Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
In Latin American intellectual history, modernism is a term that can be usefully and accurately applied to at least two distinct intellectual movements: a clearly…
John Maynard Keynes, CB, FBA, first baron Keynes of Tilton, was an economist, moral philosopher, and patron of the arts. The tension between ethical and…
George Daoud Corm was a painter and francophone poet dedicated to Christian ethics and the classical tradition of European Humanism. He attended the Ecole Nationale…
Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and thinker whose long career concerned aesthetics, ethics, literary and cultural theory, linguistics, and sociology. His earliest works, in…
Krzysztof Kieślowski was a highly influential Polish filmmaker in the tradition of auteur cinema. Kieślowski tackled the tension between the political, spiritual, and ethical, and…
Emmanuel Lévinas was a French philosopher of Jewish–Lithuanian origins who drew strongly on German phenomenology in his investigations of intentionality, subjectivity, and ethics. An officer…
Hermann Cohen was a respected Jewish-German philosopher, who had a profound influence on various currents within the philosophical discourse of modernity. These currents included the…
Desmond MacCarthy was a literary critic and journalist. Born in Plymouth and raised in Leeds, he was educated at Eton and then at Trinity College,…
Christopher Isherwood was a British American novelist, memoirist, and playwright best known for The Berlin Diaries, a fictionalized portrayal of his experiences with the urban…
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, left-wing political activist, playwright, and novelist. One of the leading French public intellectuals of the twentieth century, he was…
Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh was a prominent poet for both modernism and left-oriented progressive Hindi literature. His development of the imaginary, his generic innovation of the…
Ernst Troeltsch was a liberal German Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion whose work spans the last decades of the German Empire and the early…
Born in Biebrich, Rhineland (now Hesse, Germany), the German philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Christian Ludwig Dilthey founded the German school of philosophy called Lebensphilosophie (philosophy…
Existential philosopher, essayist, translator and editor, Martin (Mordechai) Buber (מרטין בובר) was born in Austria and spent his earlier years studying in Vienna and Lemberg…
The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky stands at the zenith of high-modernist cinema. Amongst the many technical achievements that characterize Tarkovsky’s total art approach to cinema,…
A major inspiration to a younger generation of Marathi ‘Dalit’ authors, Baburao Bagul’s literary and critical writing is somewhat atypical of what subsequently became famous…
Maximilian ‘Max’ Karl Emil Weber was born on April 21, 1864 in Erfurt, Prussia (present-day Germany), and is a prominent figure in the emergence of…
Serge Daney was regarded as one of the greatest film critics in French intellectual culture. For Jean-Luc Godard, his untimely demise signalled the end of…
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher whose work, largely on the philosophy of language, had far-reaching implications for modernist intellectual history and for…
Nancy Lima Dent helped to establish modern dance in Toronto. She initially studied with Rita Warne and Boris Volkoff, and later was a student of…
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973) was an essayist, librettist, anthologist, teacher, and, above all, poet, active in the literary cultures of both Britain (c.1927–1939) and the…
Scheler was a philosopher in the phenomenological school. His mother was Jewish; his father was Protestant. In high school he became a Catholic but abandoned…