Intellectual currents of the twentieth century
Over the last hundred years intellectual schools have come and gone. A
dizzying procession of positivism, pragmatism,
psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, and postmodernism has passed. But beneath all of the different ideas there
are some trends that stand out.
This was the century that grew to question the claims of the natural
sciences of access to objective truth. It was also a century that grew to doubt the
centrality of the autonomous subject, becoming increasingly preoccupied with the
'otherness' of other people.
Like the arts, the human disciplines, philosophy, anthropology,
sociology, psychiatry and linguistics are all prone to great intergenerational schisms as
each new generation is tempted to overthrow the last. Genealogy in the development of
ideas seems to be futile. But beneath the Oedipal revolts there are also discernible
currents of thought, that are refreshed and develop, as each new generation rediscovers
and reworks ideas from the past.
What follows is a sketch of the development of the main schools
of thought in the twentieth century, in the West in the humanities. It omits the natural
sciences, history, and to a large extent political science. Its partiality reflects and
reproduces all the one-sidedness of the age. Conversely, it is drawn with the advantage of
hindsight and so omits some of the heated conflicts that in retrospect proved less
important than they seemed, or to be about quite different issues than they seemed at the
time.
1 Analytic philosophy and the Vienna Circle