Term | Definition |
Friedrich Nietzsche | 1844-1900
One of the most important critics of the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra(1883-85), he blasted religion and famously claimed "god is dead".
In Will to Power(1888)he wrote that only the creativity of a few supermen. |
Henri Bergson | (1859-1941): in the 1890s, he convinced many young people that immediate experience and intuition were as important as rational and scientific thinking for understanding reality. |
Georges Sorel, syndicalism | (1847-1922): Syndicalism (a manifestation of anarchism)
a. Believed socialism would come to power through a great, violent strike of all working people. |
Sigmund Freud, “ID” | Emphasis on humans as greedy irrational creatures. asserted that because the human unconscious (ID) is driven by sexual, aggressive, and pleasure-seeking desires, humans are therefore NOT rational |
Paul Valèry | (1871-1945): Poet who spoke of the “cruelly injured mind”
besieged by doubts and suffering from anxieties due to economic, political, and social disruptions of the 1920s |
Ludwig Wittgenstein | (1889-1951), part of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s.
b. Philosophy is only the logical clarification of thoughts
Developed logical empiricism. |
Logical empiricism (logical positivism) | took root in English-speaking universities
a. Developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Considers that the only meaningful philosophical problems are those that can be solved by logical analysis. |
Oswald Spenger, Decline of the West | Every culture experiences a life cycle of growth and decline;
Western civilization was in its old age, and death was
approaching in the form of conquest by Asians. |
T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” | Depicted a world of growing desolation.
Considered the most famous long poem of the 20th century |
Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front | 1929
Powerful novel detailing the horrors of trench warfare during World War I. |
Franz Kafka | (1883-1924): Portrayed helpless individuals destroyed by
inexplicably hostile and surreal forces.
The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926); The Metamorphosis (1915) |
existentialism | took root in Continental countries after World War II.
Pessimism and hopelessness were expressed
Saw life as absurd, with no inherent meaning.
Viewed a world where the individual had to find his own meaning
Most existentialists were atheist |
John-Paul Sartre | (1905-1980): Wrote that life had no meaning and
that humans simply exist
He was strongly attracted to communism |
Albert Camus | (1913-1960)
Individuals had to find meaning to life by taking action against
those things with which they disagree.
Ones actions are derived from personal choices that are
independent from religion or political ideology. |
George Orwell, 1984 | (1949): "Big Brother" (the dictator) & his totalitarian state use a new kind of language, sophisticated technology, and psychologi |
“New Physics” | much popularized after WWI, challenged long-held ideas and led to uncertainty |
Max Planck | (1858-1947): developed basis for quantum physics in 1900
a. Postulated matter & energy might be different forms of the same thing.
b. Shook foundations of 19th century physics that viewed atoms as the stable, basic building blocks of nature... |
Albert Einstein, theory of relativity | (1879-1955)
challenged traditional ideas of Newtonian physics (E=MC^2)
United apparently infinite universe with incredibly small, fast moving subatomic world.
Matter and energy are interchangeable... |
Ernest Rutherford | (1871-1937): In 1919, he demonstrated the atom
could be split |
Werner Heisenberg | (1901-1976): “principle of uncertainty”-- as it is
impossible to know the position and speed of an individual election, it is therefore impossible to predict its behavior.
The dynamics of an experiment alters the state of the subject. |
Bauhaus movement, Walter Gropius | (1883-1969), broke sharply with the past in his design of the Fagus shoe factory at Alfeld, Germany (1911).
a. Clean, light, elegant building of glass and iron.
b. Represented a jump into the middle of the 20th century |
Pablo Picasso, Guernica | (1881-1973): most important artist of the 20th century
a. Developed cubism along with Georges Braque
____ (1937) is considered his masterpiece.
Huge mural portraying the bombing of a Spanish city by the
German Luftwaffe in 1937 |
Wassily Kandinsky | (1866-1944) sought to evoke emotion through non-figural painting |
Dadaism | "Dada" was a nonsensical word that mirrored a post-WWI
world that no longer made sense.
a. Attacked all accepted standards of art and behavior, delighting in outrageous conduct.
b. e.g., Mona Lisa painted with a mustache (Marcel Duchamp) |
Surrealism | a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, |
Salvador Dali | (1904-1989) most important
a. After 1924, painted a fantastic world of wild dreams and complex symbols, where watches melted and giant metronomes beat time in impossible alien landscapes.
b. His most famous painting is “Persistence of Memory”, 1931 |
Igor Stravinsky | (1882-1971): Most important composer of the 20th
century
"Rite of Spring" (1906) experimented with new tonalities (many of them dissonant) and aggressive primitive rhythms |
Arnold Schönberg | (1874-1951): pioneered "12-tone" technique
(atonality)
This style of music was somewhat akin to Wassily Kandinsky’s non figural painting in his extreme abstract expressionist style |