20th-century philosophers
A list with every line of influence
Analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory and structuralism, up to thinkers still writing today.
84 thinkers of the 20th century on this map, from Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) to Derek Parfit (1942–2017). 83 lines of influence stay inside the era, 71 arrive from other eras and 0 lead out of it.
The most influential 20th-century philosophers
Ranked by how many thinkers on the map draw on them directly. See the full ranking.
- Edmund Husserl 9 direct followers
- Martin Heidegger 8 direct followers
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 6 direct followers
- Gottlob Frege 5 direct followers
- Ferdinand de Saussure 5 direct followers
- Bertrand Russell 4 direct followers
- Roman Jakobson 4 direct followers
- W. V. O. Quine 4 direct followers
All 84 20th-century philosophers, by birth
- Gottlob Frege 1848–1925
Invented modern logic and the sense/reference split — analytic philosophy's quiet origin.
- Ferdinand de Saussure 1857–1913
Signifier meets signified: founded modern linguistics and handed philosophy its structural turn.
- Georg Simmel 1858–1918
Sociology of the forms — money, the metropolis, and the tragedy of culture.
- John Dewey 1859–1952
Pragmatism applied to schools and democracy — philosophy as public problem-solving.
- Henri Bergson 1859–1941
Time lived (durée) versus time measured; creative evolution against mechanism.
- Edmund Husserl 1859–1938
Bracketed the world to describe pure experience — phenomenology's founder.
- Max Weber 1864–1920
Disenchanted the world: bureaucracy, charisma, and the Protestant work ethic as fate.
- Lev Shestov 1866–1938
Philosophy of tragedy against reason — Dostoevsky and Nietzsche over Athens.
- W. E. B. Du Bois 1868–1963
Pioneer of sociology and double-consciousness, and of a philosophy of race.
- Nikolay Lossky 1870–1965
Intuitivist of the given — knowledge as a direct grasp of reality in its all-unity.
- Kitarō Nishida 1870–1945
Founded the Kyoto School: pure experience before the subject/object split.
- Sergei Bulgakov 1871–1944
From Marxist economics to Orthodox theology — priest and sophiologist after Solovyov.
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
Logic, language, and public dissent — the analytic tradition's loudest voice.
- G. E. Moore 1873–1958
Defended common sense and the indefinability of good, opening analytic ethics.
- Nikolai Berdyaev 1874–1948
Freedom before being: personalist Christianity, creativity, and the meaning of history.
- Ernst Cassirer 1874–1945
Marburg Neo-Kantian who read humanity as the animal symbolicum.
- Max Scheler 1874–1928
Phenomenologist of values, love, and the personal core of the human.
- Semyon Frank 1877–1950
Philosopher of the unknowable: the absolute as the living whole beyond being.
- Muhammad Iqbal 1877–1938
Poet-philosopher of the self and the reconstruction of Islamic thought.
- Pavel Florensky 1882–1937
Priest-scientist of the Silver Age: icon theology, paradox, and the pillar of truth.
- Karl Jaspers 1883–1969
Existenz, limit situations, and the Axial Age — psychiatry's loss was philosophy's gain.
- György Lukács 1885–1971
History and Class Consciousness turned Marxism toward reification and culture.
- Ernst Bloch 1885–1977
Philosophy of hope and the not-yet: utopia as a category of being.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
Two philosophies: meaning as logical form, then as ordinary use — both revolutionary.
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
Asked why there is anything at all — Being, anxiety, and thrownness in one dense project.
- Edith Stein 1891–1942
Phenomenologist, Carmelite, Auschwitz victim — empathy as the way persons are given to us.
- Rudolf Carnap 1891–1970
Rebuilt philosophy as the logical analysis of science and language.
- Antonio Gramsci 1891–1937
Prison notebooks on hegemony, intellectuals, and the war of position.
- Walter Benjamin 1892–1940
Read modernity in arcades, reproducible art, and the angel of history.
- Roman Ingarden 1893–1970
Phenomenology of the literary work and the ontology of realism.
- Mikhail Bakhtin 1895–1975
Dialogism and the carnivalesque: meaning is born between voices, never in one.
- Max Horkheimer 1895–1973
Founder of critical theory: reason becomes instrumental and turns on its makers.
- Roman Jakobson 1896–1982
Structural linguist of the Prague Circle who carried form across poetics and semiotics.
- Herbert Marcuse 1898–1979
One-Dimensional Man: taught the New Left that freedom can be repressive in comfort.
- Louis Hjelmslev 1899–1965
Glossematics: language as pure form, the engine of high structuralism.
- Alfred Schutz 1899–1959
Social phenomenology of the lifeworld and the everyday stock of knowledge.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer 1900–2002
Understanding as fusion of horizons — hermeneutics as the way all interpretation works.
- Gilbert Ryle 1900–1976
The Concept of Mind dissolved the ghost in the machine.
- Erich Fromm 1900–1980
Humanist psychoanalysis of escape, love, and the sane society.
- Jacques Lacan 1901–1981
The unconscious structured like a language — Freud reread through Hegel and Saussure.
- Karl Popper 1902–1994
Science advances by falsification, not induction — and open societies by criticism.
- Alexandre Kojève 1902–1968
His Hegel lectures invented the modern 'end of history' and shaped French thought.
- Émile Benveniste 1902–1976
Linguist who made subjectivity and the speech act a matter of language.
- Theodor W. Adorno 1903–1969
Critical theory's negative dialectician: the culture industry administers even our leisure.
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
Existence precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, in a café or a war.
- Hannah Arendt 1906–1975
Thought politics as action and named 'the banality of evil' — totalitarianism's clearest reader.
- Emmanuel Levinas 1906–1995
Ethics as first philosophy: the face of the other obliges before thought begins.
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
One is not born, but becomes, a woman — existentialism turned into feminism.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908–1961
Perception is embodied before it is thought — phenomenology of the flesh.
- W. V. O. Quine 1908–2000
Attacked the analytic/synthetic wall and made ontology a question of variables.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
Read myth kinship and taboo as structures — anthropology's structuralist revolution.
- Simone Weil 1909–1943
Mystic-militant: attention as prayer, affliction as the cross's mirror, the factory as abjection.
- A. J. Ayer 1910–1989
Language, Truth and Logic carried logical positivism to the English public.
- J. L. Austin 1911–1960
How to do things with words: saying is often doing — performative utterances.
- Wilfrid Sellars 1912–1989
Attacked the myth of the given and joined the manifest to the scientific image.
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
The absurd: the world keeps silent, and we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- Roland Barthes 1915–1980
Mythologies and the death of the author made semiology a cultural critique.
- Algirdas Julien Greimas 1917–1992
Semiotics of the actantial model: narratives as deep structures.
- Donald Davidson 1917–2003
Actions, events, and truth: meaning is public and charity is the rule.
- Louis Althusser 1918–1990
Marx via structure: ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.
- G. E. M. Anscombe 1919–2001
Wittgenstein's translator who remade ethics around intention and virtue.
- P. F. Strawson 1919–2006
Descriptive metaphysics of persons and the bounds of sense.
- Philippa Foot 1920–2010
Revived virtue ethics and natural goodness against the fact/value gap.
- John Rawls 1921–2002
Justice designed behind a veil of ignorance — liberalism's greatest late statement.
- Gilles Deleuze 1925–1995
Philosophy as creation of concepts — rhizomes, difference, and becoming over being.
- Michael Dummett 1925–2011
Made truth a matter of verification and Frege the father of analytic philosophy.
- Frantz Fanon 1925–1961
Psychiatry and revolution: colonialism as a disease of the colonized and the colonizer.
- Michel Foucault 1926–1984
Traced power through prisons, clinics, and sexuality — knowledge is never innocent.
- Hilary Putnam 1926–2016
Twin earth, semantic externalism, and the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy.
- Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998
Systems theory of society as communication without subjects.
- Jürgen Habermas 1929–2026
Reason lives in conversation: communicative action against colonized lifeworlds.
- Bernard Williams 1929–2003
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy: luck, integrity, and the end of the ethical theory.
- Alasdair MacIntyre 1929–2025
After Virtue recovered the virtues against the wreckage of the Enlightenment project.
- Jacques Derrida 1930–2004
Deconstruction: meaning deferred, hierarchies undone, texts writing themselves astray.
- Gérard Genette 1930–2018
Narratology: order, duration, and voice as the grammar of narrative.
- Richard Rorty 1931–2007
Philosophy without mirrors — truth as what your community lets you get away with.
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
Semiotics of the open work and the limits of interpretation.
- John Searle 1932–2025
Speech acts, intentionality, and the Chinese room against strong AI.
- Edward Said 1935–2003
Orientalism exposed how the West invented the East to rule it.
- Robert Nozick 1938–2002
Anarchy, state, utopia: the minimal state, entitlement theory, and the Wilt Chamberlain example.
- Tzvetan Todorov 1939–2017
Structural poetics of the fantastic, later a critic of totalitarian memory.
- Saul Kripke 1940–2022
Naming and Necessity: rigid designators and the metaphysics of possible worlds.
- David Lewis 1941–2001
On the Plurality of Worlds: modal realism and the metaphysics of counterfactuals.
- Derek Parfit 1942–2017
Reasons and Persons: personal identity may not matter — ethics became rigorous.