How can we even begin to appreciate the philosophical heritage of that turbulent, terrifying, but enormously productive period? To review such a vast repertoire of philosophy is certainly challenging. Developing a critical assessment of twentiethcentury philosophy, then, one that identifies accurately its main accomplishments (avoiding ideological distortion and clannishness) as well as the problems it bequeaths to current thinking, is a remarkably complex and demanding affair, but nonetheless it stands as an important, even urgent, task, one that calls for judgement and decision.3 Given that historians are apt to speak of “long” centuries, certainly the twentieth century must now seem one of the longest. This tumultuous period was characterized by world wars, the rise and fall of Communist, fascist, and totalitarian states, the invention of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, genocide, famine, anti-colonial struggles, globalization and technologization on an enormous scale. Rapid scientific and technological advances were coupled with political catastrophes and dramatic events of a scale hitherto unimagined. But we are still too close and the century in many ways – not least in terms of its intellectual legacy – remains an undigested mass for us, we who are still living so completely in its shadow.
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