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A philosophical movement is either the appearance or increased popularity of a specific school of philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, or a fairly broad but identifiable sea-change in philosophical thought on a particular subject. Major philosophical movements are often characterized with reference to the nation
Nation

A nation is a cultural and social community. In as much as most members never meet each other, yet feel a common bond, it may be considered an imagined community....
, language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
, or historical era in which they arose.

Talk of a philosophical movement can often function as a shorthand for talk of the views of a great number of different philosophers (and others associated with philosophy, such as historians, artists, scientists and political figures).






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A philosophical movement is either the appearance or increased popularity of a specific school of philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, or a fairly broad but identifiable sea-change in philosophical thought on a particular subject. Major philosophical movements are often characterized with reference to the nation
Nation

A nation is a cultural and social community. In as much as most members never meet each other, yet feel a common bond, it may be considered an imagined community....
, language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
, or historical era in which they arose.

Talk of a philosophical movement can often function as a shorthand for talk of the views of a great number of different philosophers (and others associated with philosophy, such as historians, artists, scientists and political figures). On the other hand, most philosophical movements in history consisted in a great number of individual thinkers who disagreed in various ways; it is often inaccurate and something of a caricature to treat any movement as consisting in followers of uniform opinion. More often the defining ideas of any philosophical movement are templates on which individual thinkers develop their own particular ideas.

Like specific doctrines and theories, movements are often given names with "ism" suffixes. What makes a movement identifiable and interesting as distinct from a specific theory is simply that a movement consists in a large flourishing of intellectual work on one or more ideas, in a fairly specifiable time and place. Following is short list of major philosophical movements, in rough chronological order:

The ancient world

  • Cynicism
  • Epicureanism
    Epicureanism

    Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus , founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomism materialism, following in the steps of Democritus....
  • Hedonism
    Hedonism

    Hedonism is a school of philosophy which argues that pleasure has an intrinsic value and is the most important pursuit of humanity....
  • Neoplatonism
    Neoplatonism

    Neoplatonism is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, founded by Plotinus and based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonism....
  • Pythagoreanism
    Pythagoreanism

    Pythagoreanism is a term used for the esoteric and metaphysics beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were much influenced by mathematics and probably a very inspirational source for Plato and Platonism....
  • Platonic realism
    Platonic realism

    Platonic realism is a philosophy term usually used to refer to the idea of Philosophical realism regarding the existence of universals after the Greek philosophy philosopher Plato , a student of Socrates, and the teacher of Aristotle....
  • Pyrrhonian skepticism
  • Pre-Socratic philosophy
    Pre-Socratic philosophy

    The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy were active before Socrates or contemporaneously, but expounding knowledge developed earlier. The popularity of the term originates with Hermann Diels' work Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker ....
  • Stoicism
    Stoicism

    Stoicism was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century B.C. The stoics considered passionate emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a Sage , or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not have such emotions....
  • Sophism
    Sophism

    Sophism can mean two very different things: In the modern definition, a sophism is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone....


The middle ages

  • Averroism
    Averroism

    Averroism is the term applied to either of two philosophy trends among scholasticism in the late 13th century, the first of which was based on the Early Islamic philosophy Averroes's interpretations of Aristotle and his reconciliation of Aristotelianism with the Islamic faith....
  • Mu'tazili
    Mu'tazili

    Mu?tazilah is a theology school of thought within Sunni Islam. It is also anglicized as Mu?tazilite. They are usually not accepted by other Sunni Muslims, though their theology parallels Shi'a Islam, such as their belief in the indivinity of the Qur'an....
  • Ash'ari
    Ash'ari

    The Ash?ari theology is a school of early Kalam founded by the theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari . The disciples of the school are known as Ash'arites, and the school is also referred to as Ash'arite school....
  • Maturidi
    Maturidi

    In Islam, a Maturidi is one who follows Abu Mansur Al Maturidi's theology, which is a close variant of the Ash'ari theology . The Maturidis, Asharis and Atharis are all part of Sunni Islam, which makes up the overwhelming majority of Muslims....
  • Jabrites
  • Qadariyya
  • Kalam
    Kalam

    Kalam is the Islamic philosophy of seeking Islamic theology principles through dialectic. In Arabic language the word literally means "speech"....
  • Murji'ah
    Murji'ah

    Murji'ah is an early Islamic school, whose followers are known in English language as Murjites or Murji'ites .During the early centuries of Islam, Muslim thought encountered a multitude of influences from various ethnic and philosophical groups that it absorbed....
  • Alfarabian logic
  • Illuminationist
  • Scholasticism
    Scholasticism

    Scholasticism was the dominant form of theology and philosophy in the Western Europe in the Middle Ages, particularly in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries....
  • Thomism
    Thomism

    Thomism is the philosophical school that arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas. The word comes from the name of its originator, whose Summa Theologica is arguably second only to the Bible in importance to the Roman Catholic Church....


The modern world

  • Analytic Philosophy
    Analytic philosophy

    Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand the overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments....
     -- Gottlob Frege
    Gottlob Frege

    Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a Germany mathematics who became a logician and philosophy. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy....
    , Bertrand Russell
    Bertrand Russell

    Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Order of Merit , Fellow of the Royal Society , was a British people philosopher, mathematical logic, mathematician, historian, advocate for social reform, and pacifism....
    , W. V. O. Quine
  • Continental Philosophy
    Continental philosophy

    Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic philo...
  • Critical theory (Frankfurt School) -- see also Critical theory
    Critical theory

    In the humanities and social sciences, critical theory is the examination and critique of society and literature, drawing from knowledge across social sciences and humanities disciplines....
  • Deconstructivism
    Deconstruction

    Deconstruction is a term used in philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, popularised through its usage by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s....
     -- Jacques Derrida
    Jacques Derrida

    Jacques Derrida was a France philosophy born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction, which was originally a translation of a Heideggerian term from Being and Time, also translated as 'De-structuring'....
  • Empiricism
    Empiricism

    In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "theory of knowledge"....
    , dominant in Britain following Hobbes
    Thomas Hobbes

    Thomas Hobbes was an English philosophy, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory....
  • The Enlightenment which drew attention to the importance of science
    Science

    In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
     and reason
    Reason

    Reason may refer to Mind#Mental faculties that consciously create explanations in order to judge, decide, solve problems, generalize, and give examples, among other activities....
     to human life
  • Existentialism
    Existentialism

    Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
     -- Søren Kierkegaard
    Søren Kierkegaard

    S?ren Aabye Kierkegaard was a prolific 19th century Denmark philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time, and what he saw as the empty ceremony of the Church of Denmark....
    , Martin Heidegger
    Martin Heidegger

    Martin Heidegger was an influential Germany Philosophy. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century....
    , Jean-Paul Sartre
    Jean-Paul Sartre

    Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialism philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism....
  • French materialism
    French materialism

    French materialism is the name given to a handful of France 18th century philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment, many of them clustered around the salon of Baron d'Holbach....
  • German idealism
    German idealism

    ||-||-||-||}German idealism was a philosophy movement in Germany in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment....
     -- Immanuel Kant
    Immanuel Kant

    Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German Philosophy from the Kingdom of Prussia city of K?nigsberg . He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Age of Enlightenment....
    , Fichte
    Johann Gottlieb Fichte

    Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German People philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant....
    , Schelling, Hegel
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German people philosopher, and with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism....
  • Hermeneutics
    Hermeneutics

    Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory. Traditional hermeneutics - which includes Biblical hermeneutics - refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law....
     -- Martin Heidegger
    Martin Heidegger

    Martin Heidegger was an influential Germany Philosophy. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century....
    , Hans-Georg Gadamer
    Hans-Georg Gadamer

    Hans-Georg Gadamer was a Germany philosopher of the continental philosophy, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method ....
  • Logicism
    Logicism

    Logicism is one of the schools of thought in the philosophy of mathematics, putting forth the theory that mathematics is an extension of logic and therefore some or all mathematics is reduction to logic....
     -- Gottlob Frege
    Gottlob Frege

    Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a Germany mathematics who became a logician and philosophy. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy....
  • Logical Positivism
    Logical positivism

    Logical positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology.See, e.g., : in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy     (with the Vienna Circle
    Vienna Circle

    The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers who gathered around Moritz Schlick when he was called to the Vienna University in 1922, organized in a philosophical association, of which Schlick was chairman, named the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach....
    , Logical atomism
    Logical atomism

    Logical atomism is a philosophical belief that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. Its principal exponents were the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, the early work of his Austrian-born pupil and colleague Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his German counterpart Rudolf Carnap....
     (Russell
    Bertrand Russell

    Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Order of Merit , Fellow of the Royal Society , was a British people philosopher, mathematical logic, mathematician, historian, advocate for social reform, and pacifism....
    ), and Ideal language philosophy (Wittgenstein
    Ludwig Wittgenstein

    Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-United Kingdom philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
    ))
  • Marxism
    Marxism

    Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism holds at its core a Marxist analysis of Critique of capitalism and a theory of social change....
  • Modernism
    Modernism

    Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century....
     (more a movement in the arts, but worth noting for its connection with below)
  • Nihilism
    Nihilism

    Nihilism is the philosophy position that value_theory do not exist but rather are falsely invented. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of Nihilism#Existential_nihilism which argues that life is without meaning, purpose or intrinsic value ....
  • Objectivism
    Objectivist movement

    The Objectivist movement is a movement to study and advance Ayn Rand?s philosophy, Objectivism . Ayn Rand was a novelist and philosopher who wrote the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged....
     related to Ayn Rand
    Ayn Rand

    Ayn Rand , was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism ....
  • Ordinary language philosophy
    Ordinary language philosophy

    Ordinary language philosophy or linguistic philosophy is a philosophical school that approached traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by forgetting what words actually mean in a language....
  • Phenomenology -- Edmund Husserl
    Edmund Husserl

    Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosophy who is deemed the founder of phenomenology . He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism....
    , Martin Heidegger
    Martin Heidegger

    Martin Heidegger was an influential Germany Philosophy. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century....
    , Jean-Paul Sartre
    Jean-Paul Sartre

    Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialism philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism....
  • Postmodern philosophy
    Postmodern philosophy

    Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of the foundational assumptions and structures of philosophy. Beginning as a critique of Continental philosophy, it was heavily influenced by Phenomenology , structuralism and existentialism, including writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, S?ren Kierkegaard, Belette Des...
     -- see also Postmodernism
    Postmodernism

    Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives....
  • Poststructuralism
  • Pragmatism
    Pragmatism

    Pragmatism is the philosophy of considering practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of meaning and truth. Pragmatism is generally considered to have originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim....
  • Romanticism
    Romanticism

    Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
  • Rationalism
    Rationalism

    In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive" ....
    , dominant on continental Europe following Descartes
    René Descartes

    Ren? Descartes , , also known as Renatus Cartesius , was a French philosophy, mathematician, scientist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic....
  • Structuralism
    Structuralism

    Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure....
  • Utilitarianism
    Utilitarianism

    Utilitarianism is the idea that the morality of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all persons....
     -- Jeremy Bentham
    Jeremy Bentham

    Jeremy Bentham was an England jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He was the brother of Samuel Bentham. He was a political radical, and a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law....
    , John Stuart Mill
    John Stuart Mill

    John Stuart Mill , United Kingdom philosopher, political economy, civil servant and Parliament of the United Kingdom, was an influential liberalism thinker of the 19th century....
  • Post Philosophy


The Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romanticism are broader cultural "movements" that happened to characterised by fairly distinctive philosophical concerns.

Movements in Eastern and African philosophies

See Eastern philosophy
Eastern philosophy

Eastern philosophy includes the various philosophy of Asia, including Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Iranian philosophy, Japanese philosophy, and Korean philosophy....
 for a list of Asian philosophical movements. See African philosophy
African philosophy

African Philosophy is used in different ways by different philosophers. Although African philosophers spend their time doing work in many different areas, such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy, a great deal of the literature is taken up with a debate concerning the nature of African philosophy itself....
 for a list of African philosophical movements.