Emergent philosophy - Definition and Overview

Emergent philosophies are those newly formed philosophies which are at, or are on the cusp of serious recognition as philosophical schools and theories. This implies a temporal criterion; for example, at the point in time which Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were sitting down to formulate and expound their philosophies, French existentialism could have been conceived of as being an emergent philosophy; it now, of course, is no such thing, it is recognised as a particular branch of existentialism. Since currently the preponderance of the emergent philosophies are or appear to be inspired by or related to developments in technology, we have elected to deal with them within this ambit rather than in the realm of pure philosophy.

Since history must decide whether a school of thought comes to be recognized a serious field of philosophy, or whether it is forgotten, it is obviously possible to apply this label only retrospectively: we may say of an accepted school of philosophy when it was merely emergent. For example:

German idealism was an emergent school of philosophy between 1781 (with the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) and, probably, 1807 (with the publication of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit).

Existentialism, as mentioned above, was emergent in the 1930s.

Only history will be able to tell what today's emergent philosophies are.

External link

• Examples of emergent philosophies (http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html)