Contemporary philosophy

Within the last century, philosophy has increasingly become an activity practiced within the university, and accordingly it has grown more specialized and more distinct from the natural sciences. Much of philosophy in this period concerns itself with explaining the relation between the theories of the natural sciences and the ideas of the humanities or common sense.

In the Anglophone world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school. In the first half of the century, it was a cohesive school, more or less identical to logical positivism, united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language. In the latter half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy diffused into a wide variety of disparate philosophical views, only loosely united by historical lines of influence and a self-identified commitment to clarity and rigor. Since roughly 1960, analytic philosophy has shown a revival of interest in the history of philosophy, as well as attempts to integrate philosophical work with scientific results, especially in psychology and cognitive science.

On continental Europe, no single school or temperament enjoyed dominance. The flight of the logical positivists from central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, however, diminished philosophical interest in natural science, and an emphasis on the humanities, broadly construed, figures prominently in what is usually called "continental philosophy". Twentieth century movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, and post structuralism are included within this loose category.