Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers topics including technology, Immanuel Kant, metaphysics, and humanism. He is often considered to be among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Franz Rosenzweig was a German theologian, philosopher, and translator.
Continental philosophy is an umbrella term for philosophies prominent in continental Europe. Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy. These themes proposed by Rosen derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical inquiry.
Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
In late modern continental philosophy, neo-Kantianism was a revival of the 18th-century philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The neo-Kantians sought to develop and clarify Kant's theories, particularly his concept of the thing-in-itself and his moral philosophy.
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life is a 1951 critical theory book by German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno started writing it during World War II, in 1944, while he lived as an exile in America, and completed it in 1949. It was originally written for the fiftieth birthday of his friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer, who had co-authored the earlier book Dialectic of Enlightenment with Adorno.
Babette Babich is an American philosopher who writes from a continental perspective on aesthetics, philosophy of science, especially Nietzsche's, and technology, especially Heidegger's and Günther Anders, in addition to critical and cultural theory.
Martin Evan Jay is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
Paul R. Mendes-Flohr is a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought. As an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr specializes in 19th and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss.
Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. Focusing on modern European thought from Kant and Hegel to Adorno and Heidegger, Hammer’s research includes critical theory, Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, German idealism, social and political theory, and aesthetics. He has also written widely on the philosophy of literature and taken a special interest in the question of temporality.
Michael Friedman is an American philosopher who serves as Suppes Professor of Philosophy of Science and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies at Stanford University. Friedman is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially on scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics, and for his historical work on Immanuel Kant. Friedman has done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. He also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
Ethan Kleinberg works on the acrobatics of modern thought. He is Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University, Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory and was Director of Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. Kleinberg's research interests include European intellectual history with special interest in France and Germany, critical theory, educational structures, and the philosophy of history. Together with Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder he is a member of the Wild On Collective who co-authored the "Theses on Theory and History" and started the #TheoryRevolt movement. He is the author of Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (SUP); Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past (SUP); Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-61 (CUP) which was awarded the 2006 Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best book in intellectual history by the Journal of the History of Ideas and co-editor of the volume Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century (CUP). He is completing a book length project titled The Surge: a new compass of history for the end-time of truth.
Paul Walter Franks is the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at Yale University. He graduated with his PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Franks' dissertation, entitled "Kant and Hegel on the Esotericism of Philosophy", was supervised by Stanley Cavell and won the Emily and Charles Carrier Prize for a Dissertation in Moral Philosophy at Harvard University. He completed his B.A and M.A, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to this, Franks received his general education at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and studied classical rabbinic texts at Gateshead Talmudical College.
Christian Lotz is a German-American professor of philosopher at Michigan State University. Lotz's work primarily focuses on 19th and 20th Century European philosophy, continental aesthetics, critical theory, Marxism, and contemporary European political philosophy.
The Davos University Conferences were a project between 1928 and 1931 to create an international university at Davos in Switzerland.
In 1929 Ernst Cassirer took part in a historically significant encounter with Martin Heidegger in Davos during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs,.
Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos is a 2010 book by Peter Gordon, in which the author reconstructs the famous 1929 debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland, demonstrating its significance as a point of rupture in Continental thought that implicated all the major philosophical movements of the day. Continental Divide was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society in 2010.
