3. Tell Me About Modern, Post-Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy

I referred you here from 

101phil http://101phil.blogspot.com/2010/09/14.html


Time, Zero, and Empathy

where examples, with a lengthly Editor's Note in fine print, 
follow Time.  

The Europeans and the English-speakers are in a great rift. 

The French consider the prolific Existentialist Sartre the greatest Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, while the British regard Bertrand Russell, winner of the Noble prize for Literature in 1950, as the greatest.  

In short:  Philosophy Today: One of the most popular is Phenomology, one of the Post-Modern Philosophies of Twentieth Century Eurporean Philosophy. Existentialism assumes existence and asks what we are going to do with it; next, Phenomenology looks at the essence of existence; then, Structualism looks at the shape of existence; finally, Post-Structualism says all is fragments; and altogether, these form Post-Modernism, which is still with us today.

The British and the Americans get a little sea-sick with it all, and prefer Analytic Philosophy, sort of a cross between Scepticism and Logic, with a little Linguistics. The truly disallusioned have moved onto Computer Science. 

More recently, Cognitive Science trys to look at where the brain meets the thought.  Is thinking nothing more than computation, they ask.  How do we know the difference between a computer and a person?  Turing proposed a test which is still used.  You can read more about this at Question 5, "Tell Me About the Turing Test."

Turing designed an early computer that cracked the Nazi code, then was sentenced to prison by the ungrateful British government for being gay.  He died soon after from suicide.    

As the lives of Socrates and Spinoza and St. Edith Stein and Turing describe, Philosophy can be a dangerous business.