^{Winter semester 2026/27}
Where is the Federal Republic heading?
Philosophy in Germany since 1945

With *The Question of Guilt*, Karl Jaspers opened the way in 1945, from the perspective of existential philosophy, to the manifold analyses of the post-war era. Following this, various schools of thought developed in the young Federal Republic, each seeking an answer to the modern catastrophe.
Martin Heidegger was slow to regain a foothold in academic life, but managed to attract followers with his esoterically charged philosophy. Jürgen Habermas sharply criticised Heidegger’s political stance as he began to shape his own intellectual profile. The young Habermas soon sought to align himself with the emerging Frankfurt School, which had returned from exile with *The Dialectic of Enlightenment* and was to shape public discourse with its social-philosophical thinking. Ernst Bloch, too, gained enormous significance for the 1968 era following his move from East to West Germany.
By contrast, Hannah Arendt, writing from New York, found only limited resonance for her anti-totalitarian thinking until 1989, particularly as she remained independent of any particular school of thought. At the same time, Karl Popper, from England, challenged the utopian movements with his critical rationalism, which his students sometimes espoused dogmatically. Alongside the charismatic legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the influence of analytical philosophy also grew from the Anglo-Saxon world.
In Germany, Joachim Ritter established a liberal-conservative tradition. Unlike Helmuth Plessner in his Philosophical Anthropology, this tradition enquires into the nature of the human being who, with his exceptional consciousness, must confront a lifeworld that is determined in manifold ways. Following in the hermeneutic tradition of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dieter Henrich sought to transform philosophical inquiry, building on idealism, into a study of constellations, with a view to drawing the individual into the process of thought.