Western philosophy
Late modern (19th century)

Late modern philosophy is usually considered to begin around the pivotal year of 1781, when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died and Immanuel Kant 's Critique of Pure Reason appeared. The 19th century saw the beginnings of what would later grow into the divide between Continental and analytic traditions of philosophy, with the former more interested in general frameworks of metaphysics (more common in the German-speaking world), and the latter focusing on issues of epistemology, ethics, law and politics (more common in the English-speaking world).

German philosophy exercised broad influence in this century, owing in part to the dominance of the German university system. German idealists, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the members of Jena Romanticism (Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel), transformed the work of Kant by maintaining that the world is constituted by a rational or mind-like process, and as such is entirely knowable.

Hegel argued that history was the dialectical journey of the Geist (universal mind) towards self-fulfilment and self-realization. The Geist's self-awareness is absolute knowledge, which itself brings complete freedom. His philosophy was based on absolute idealism, with reality itself being mental. His legacy was divided between the conservative Right Hegelians and radical Young Hegelians, with the latter including David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach argued for a materialist conception of Hegel's thought, inspiring Karl Marx.

Arthur Schopenhauer was inspired by Kant and Indian philosophy. Accepting Kant's division of the world into the noumenal (the real) and phenomenal (the apparent) realities, he, nevertheless, disagreed on the accessibility of the former, arguing that it could in fact be accessed. The experience of will was how this reality was accessible, with the will underlying the whole of nature, with everything else being appearance. Whereas he believed the frustration of this will was the cause of suffering, Friedrich Nietzsche thought that the will to power was empowering, leading to growth and expansion, and therefore forming the basis of ethics.

Jeremy Bentham established utilitarianism, which was a consequentialist ethic based on 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number', an idea taken from Cesare Beccaria. He believed that any act could be measured by its value in this regard through the application of felicific calculus. His associate James Mill's son John Stuart Mill subsequently took up his thought. However, in contrast to the valuation of pure pleasure in Bentham's work, Mill divided pleasures into higher and lower kinds.

Logic began a period of its most significant advances since the inception of the discipline, as increasing mathematical precision opened entire fields of inference to formalization in the work of George Boole and Gottlob Frege. Other philosophers who initiated lines of thought that would continue to shape philosophy into the 20th century include:
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