The history of philosophy is mostly the history of various schools arguing with each other about what’s good or true. The Epicureans, the Empiricists, the Stoics, the Skeptics, the Positivists, the Pragmatists — you get the point.
I’m not an official member of any of these clubs, but if you asked me to pick one, I’d go with the Existentialists. For me, existentialism was the last great philosophical movement. Part of the reason for that is purely historical. Existentialism emerged in the early- to mid-20th century, against the backdrop of two devastating world wars, and many of the existentialists were responding to that.
Another reason for the movement’s appeal is that its leading proponents didn’t just write arcane academic treatises; they wrote novels and plays and popular essays, and their ideas crossed over into the culture. They also engaged with concrete questions about freedom and responsibility and authenticity,…