Modern Era

The Modern period of philosophy generally corresponds to the 17th and 20th Century. More
recent developments in the late 20th Century are sometimes referred to as the Contemporary
period. The Modern period exploded in a flurry of new philosophical movements and in addition
to further developments in Age of Enlightenment movements such as German Idealism,
Kantianism and Romanticism.

Modern philosophy consists of a mix of new approaches to philosophy fueled by science,

rejections of religious teachings and, on the other hand, defenses of religion based on the new
evidence. The modern philosophical era also saw the revival of epistemology as one of its
central features, as new forms of science brought forth the question of whether or not empirical
data is a suitable source of knowledge.
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, Prussia

and the third of seven children of a Jewish family.His father,
Heinrich Marx, was descended from a long line of Jewish
rabbis, but converted to Lutheran Christianity in order to
continue practicing law; his mother was Henriette Pressburg.

Marx was a German philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary of the 19th Century. He was best
known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary and “Father of Communism.”He married Jenny von
Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron, despite the objections of both families.

Marx was educated at home until the age of thirteen, when he attended the Trier Gymnasium. In 1835,
at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law because his father would not
allow him to study philosophy and literature however, he did not pursue his studies diligently and his
father moved him the next year to the more serious and academically orientated Humboldt University in
Berlin.

In 1841 he earned his doctorate with a thesis entitled "The Difference Between the Democritean and
Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” And in 1843, Marx moved to Paris, in order to work with Arnold Ruge
(1802 - 1880), another German revolutionary, on the political journal "Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher” and in 1844 he met Friedrich Engels, and began the most important friendship of his life.
Engels had come to Paris specifically to see Marx, and to discuss with him Engels' greatest individual
work, "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844". Engels guided Marx's interest in
economics.

In 1845, Marx and Engels and many others were ordered to leave Paris and Marx and Engels moved to
Brussels, Belgium. In early 1848 Marx and Engels' published their most famous work, "The Communist
Manifesto" Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Marx continued the laborious task of writing his huge
works on political economy, spending day after day in the reading room of the British Museum.

In 1867 he published the first volume of the most important of these was his masterwork "Das Kapital"
("Capital") and in 1871 Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, "The Civil War in France" in
enthusiastic defense of the Commune after its bloody suppression.

In 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen months of his life, and
that eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy from which he died in London on 14 March 1883.
Contemporary Era

The present period in the history of Western Philosophy and rise of analytic and continental philosophy,
postmodernism, structuralism, etc. The names are already considered obsolete, in some senses, but
many philosophers still observe a difference between the logical and scientific approach of analytic
philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology and other approaches.

The term ‘contemporary philosophy’ refers to the current era of philosophy, generally dealing with
philosophers from the late nineteenth century through to the twenty-first and the 19th century also
began to see a division in the approach to philosophy being taken in different areas of western
philosophy.
Jean Paul Sartre

Born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France, Jean-Paul Sartre was a

pioneering intellectual and proponent of existentialism who
championed leftist causes in France and other countries.

Jean Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was the only child of Jean
Baptiste Sartre and Anne- Marie Schweitzer.

Sartre was a French Novelist, Playwright, and exponent of

Existentialism and Philosopher of Individual Freedom. He emphasizes the importance of free individual
choice, regardless of the power of other people to influence and coerce our desires, beliefs, and
decisions.

As a young man, Sartre became interested in philosophy after reading Henri Bergson’s essay “Time and
Free Will.” He earned a doctorate in philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, absorbing
ideas from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, among others.

In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist and in 1941 he
was able to secure a teaching position at Lycée Pasteur, outside of Paris. Jean Paul Sartre was a
pioneering intellectual and proponent of existentialism who championed lettist causes in France and
other countries.

He wrote a number of books, including the highly influential "Being and Nothingless" Nausea / La
nausée (1938), The Wall / Le mur (1939), Bariona / Bariona, ou le fils du tonnerre (1940), The Flies / Les
mouches (1943), No Exit / Huis clos (1944), The Age of Reason / L'âge de raison (1945), The Reprieve / Le
sursis (1945), and The Respectful Prostitute / La putain respectueuse (1946).

After World War II he emerged as a politically engaged activist. In 1964 he renounced literature in an
account of the first 10 years of his life and in 1964 Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He
declined the prize, becoming the first Nobel Laureate to do so.

Sartre's physical condition deteriorated in the 1970s, and he became almost completely blind in 1973.
He died in Paris on April 15, 1980, from pulmonary edema. Jean-Paul Sartre is buried at Montparnasse
Cemetery; he shares a grave with life-long partner Simone de Beauvoir.
Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in

Messkirch in south-west Germany to a Catholic family. His
father worked as sexton in the local church. In his early youth,
Heidegger was being prepared for the priesthood. Heidegger
was one of the most original and important philosophers of the
20th Century, but also one of the most controversial.

His best known book, "Being and Time", although notoriously difficult, is generally considered to be one
of the most important philosophical works of the 20th Century and in 1903, he went to the high school
in Konstanz, where the church supported him by a scholarship. His early introduction to philosophy
came with his reading of "On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle" by the philosopher
and psychologist Franz Brentano.

From 1909 to 1911, he started to study theology at the University of Freiburg, but then broke off his
training for the priesthood and switched to studying philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences and
in 1917, he married Elfriede Petri, an attractive economics student and Protestant with known anti-
Semitic views, who would remain at his side for the rest of his life, despite the very "open" nature of the
marriage. In 1918, he broke definitively with Catholicism, and returned to Freiburg as a (salaried) senior
assistant to Husserl until 1923.

In 1930s and 1940s his writings became less systematic and often more obscure, and he developed a
preoccupation with the question of language, a fascination with poetry, a concern with modern
technology, as well as a new-found respect for the early Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. In 1951, he
became Professor emeritus at Freiburg and taught regularly until 1958, and then by invitation until 1967
with the support of some unlikely allies, such as the Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists.

During the last three decades of his life, he continued to write and publish, although there was little
significant change in his underlying philosophy. Heidegger died on 26 May 1976, and was buried in the
Messkirch cemetery.