Philosophy Chronology

Timeline of Events 1900 - 2003

• Philosophy • Introduction to Philosophy • Biographies of Philosophers • Schools of Philosophy • Branches of Philosophy

There are four different types of color-coded dates in these timelines of philosophy:

• European Philosophy
• American Philosophy
• Asian and Islamic Philosophy
• Miscellaneous Events in Philosophy

Words in red are linked to the glossary - so clicking on them will take you to much more information than can be included in brief chronology like this.

Contemporary Philosophy: 1900 - 2003
February 11, 1900	German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany.
August 25, 1900	Friedrich Nietzsche died.
December 05, 1901	Werner Heisenberg was born in Wurzburg, Germany.
December 16, 1901	The American anthropologist Margaret Mead was born.
July 25, 1902	American philosopher Eric Hoffer was born.
July 28, 1902	Philosopher and scientist Karl Popper was born in Vienna, Austria.
December 20, 1902	American philosopher and humanist Sidney Hook was born.
September 11, 1903	German philosopher Theodor Adorno was born in Frankfurt am Main.
November 07, 1903	Konrad Lorenz was born.
March 26, 1904	Joseph Campbell, expert on mythology and comparative religion, was born in New York City.
December 12, 1904	Ivan Pavlov received the Nobel prize for his work on the physiology of digestion.
February 02, 1905	Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia.
June 21, 1905	French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was born.
April 28, 1906	Kurt Gödel was born in Brunn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic).
October 01, 1906	Ivan Pavlov delivered an early description of the phenomena of classical conditioning.
October 14, 1906	Hannah Arendt was born.
March 09, 1907	Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania.
January 09, 1908	Philosopher, novelist, feminist, and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France.
June 25, 1908	American philosopher W.V. Quine was born.
November 28, 1908	Claude Levi-Strauss was born.
February 03, 1909	Simone Weil was born.
March 28, 1911	British philosopher John Langshaw Austin was born in Lancaster, England.
January 14, 1912	German philosopher Otto Liebmann died in Jena.
November 07, 1913	French philosopher Albert Camus was born.
April 19, 1914	American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce died.
February 11, 1916	Emma Goldman, an advocate of both freethought and anarchism, was arrested for lecturing on birth control.
February 19, 1916	Ernst Mach died.
September 14, 1916	American philosopher Josiah Royce died.
January 02, 1917	Sir Edward Burnett Tylor died.
January 06, 1918	German mathematician Georg Cantor died in Halle, German.
February 21, 1921	John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland.
November 09, 1922	Imre Lakatos was born in Hungary.
February 01, 1923	Historian of religion Ernst Troeltsch was born.
April 04, 1923	John Venn died.
September 18, 1924	English idealist Francis Herbert Bradley died in Oxford.
October 15, 1926	French philosopher Michel Foucault was born.
May 19, 1928	German philosopher Max Scheler died in Frankfurt, Germany.
December 07, 1928	Avram Noam Chomsky was born.
April 26, 1931	George Herbert Mead died in Chicago, Illinois.
April 24, 1933	Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement, died in New York City.
November 08, 1935	Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, died in Weimar, Germany.
May 08, 1936	Oswald Spengler, German philosopher and historian, died in Munich, Germany.
June 22, 1936	Austrian philosopher F. A. Moritz Schlick died.
December 31, 1936	Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno died.
March 06, 1937	Rudolph Otto died.
April 27, 1938	German philosopher Edmund Husserl died in Freiburg, Germany.
September 02, 1938	B. F. Skinner's ground-breaking book The Behavior of Organisms was first published. Of the 800 copies in the first printing, only 548 had been sold by 1946.
November 16, 1938	Robert Nozick, political philosopher, was born.
May 22, 1939	Ernst Toller - Marxist, pacifist, and expressionist writer - committed suicide in New York City.
May 14, 1940	Anarchist and freethinker Emma Goldman died.
August 20, 1940	Rudolf Karl Bultmann died.
September 27, 1940	Walter Benjamin, literary critic and writer, died at the age of 48 when he committed suicide in an effort to avoid capture by the Gestapo.
January 04, 1941	Henri Bergson died.
August 24, 1943	Simone Weil died.
April 14, 1945	Philosopher Karl Jaspers was supposed to be arrested by the Gestapo, but the American army entered Heidelberg on March 30 and the plans were never carried out.
October 04, 1947	German physicist Max Planck died.
December 01, 1947	B. F. Skinner became a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
March 15, 1950	Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford published their famous book "The Authoritarian Personality."
April 29, 1951	Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein died in Cambridge, England.
September 26, 1952	American philosopher and poet George Santayana died at the age of 88.
October 30, 1952	Dr. Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
December 24, 1952	The American edition of Jean Piaget's text Origins of Intelligence in Children was first published.
June 01, 1953	American philosopher and educator John Dewey died.
October 24, 1958	British philosopher G.E. Moore died.
January 04, 1960	Albert Camus died in a car accident.
February 18, 1960	British philosopher John Langshaw Austin died in Oxford, England.
January 04, 1961	Erwin Schrodinger died.
May 03, 1961	French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty died at the age of 53.
October 16, 1962	Thomas Kuhn published his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, revolutionary changes in science are a consequence of a social process which he labeled "paradigm shifts." They were not, he thought, simply a product of the discovery of new facts.
November 18, 1962	Physicist Niels Bohr dies.
June 13, 1965	Martin Buber died in Jerusalem. Buber was a Jewish philosopher and theologian who became most noted for his work on the nature of relationships.
September 04, 1965	Albert Schweitzer died in Lambarene, Gabon, Africa.
September 23, 1966	Islamic philosopher Ali Abd al-Raziq died.
December 10, 1968	Swiss theologian Karl Barth died in Basel, Switzerland.
February 26, 1969	Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers died in Basel, Switzerland.
February 02, 1970	British philosopher Bertrand Russell died in Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales.
September 14, 1970	German philosopher and mathematician Rudolph Carnap died at the age of 79.
July 07, 1973	Max Horkheimer died.
December 10, 1973	Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch, and Nikolaas Tinbergen were awarded Nobel prizes were for their ethological studies of animal behavior.
February 02, 1974	Imre Lakatos died in London, England.
October 21, 1975	Arnold J. Toynbee died.
December 04, 1975	Political philosopher Hannah Arendt died.
May 26, 1976	German philosopher Martin Heidegger died in Messkirch, Germany.
August 04, 1977	Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch died. In his work, Bloch emphasized the role of hope as an important human drive.
January 14, 1978	Kurt Gödel died in Princeton, New Jersey.
July 25, 1978	On this date, the first "test tube" baby was born, launching a debate into the ethics of in vitro fertilization which has mostly been resolved in favor of it, but many people - including many religious leaders - continue to object.
April 15, 1980	French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre died in Paris at the age of 74.
March 06, 1982	Ayn Rand died.
March 06, 1984	German Protestant and pacifist Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, Germany.
June 25, 1984	French philosopher Michel Foucault died.
December 20, 1984	American psychologist Stanley Milgram died.
April 14, 1986	Philosopher, novelist, feminist, and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris, France.
March 23, 1992	Economist and political philosopher Friedrich A. von Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany.
September 06, 1992	A 35-year old man died ten weeks after receiving a transplanted baboon liver.
September 17, 1994	Philosopher and scientist Karl Popper died.
December 25, 2000	American philosopher W.V. Quine died.
January 23, 2002	Robert Nozick died.
March 14, 2002	German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer died.

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