Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy is a group of Western philosophies first prominent in 20th-century continental Europe that derive from a broadly Kantian tradition of focusing on the individual and society. Continental philosophy includes German idealism, phenomenology, philosophical pessimism, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, posthumanism, speculative realism, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as well as some Freudian, Hegelian, and Western Marxist views. There is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Prior to the twentieth century, the term "continental" was used broadly to refer to philosophy from continental Europe. A slightly narrower use of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers since the second half of the 20th century, who use it as a convenient catch-all term to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the movement known as analytic philosophy. The term continental philosophy may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views; a similar argument has been made for analytic philosophy.