The four thinkers who reinvented philosophy

Between the wars, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin sought to transform the world by giving it their total attention – a lesson that still resonates 100 years on. 

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for The Newstatesman

(Photo By Photomontage by Dan murrell/alamy/getty images)

‘In 1936, writing from exile in Paris, the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin looked back at the storms of the recent past with clear-eyed despair. Everything had happened so quickly that it was difficult to register what, in fact, had happened. A new kind of warfare, hideously inhuman technology, an economic catastrophe, and shocking levels of political impunity had knocked the world sideways. “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body,” Benjamin wrote...’

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE