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The major twentieth-century philosophical traditions are notoriously difficult to
characterize in a nutshell. Generalizations, especially, are perilous and apt to be
misleading. Fortunately, one can begin to sketch a philosophical map, albeit a
veryrough one, in terms that are largely geographical. One of the major lines that
can be drawn on our map divides the philosophical tradition that dominates most
of the European continent, known accordingly as Continental philosophy, from
the dominant philosophical tradition of England, the United States, and some
other countries subject to strong British or American influence (such as Canada
and Australia) known as Anglo-American philosophy.
I can offer here only the most rudimentary characterizations of a few of the
main strands of Continental philosophy beginning with Phenomenology. Founded
around the turn of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, and developed by
Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology is essentially a philosophical method, one that
focuses on careful inspection and description of phenomena or appearances,
defined as any object of conscious experience, that is, that which we are conscious
of.The inspection and description are supposed to be effected without any presup-
positions, and that includes any presuppositions as to whether such objects of con-
sciousness are “real” or correspond to something “external,” or as to what their
causes or consequences may be. It is believed that by this method the essential
structures of experience and its objects can be uncovered. The sorts of experiences

TWENTIETH-

CENTURY

PHILOSOPHY



by Hans Bynagle

Adapted from Hans Bynagle, “A Map of Twentieth-Century Philosophy,”Philosophy: A Guide to the
Reference Literature,2nd edition (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1997). Reprinted by permission
of the author.