German philosophy German philosophy German philosophy, here taken to mean either (1) philosophy in the German language or (2) philosophy by Germans, has been extremely diverse, and central to both the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy for centuries, from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz through Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein to contemporary philosophers. Søren Kierkegaard (a Danish philosopher) is frequently included in surveys of German (or Germanic) philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was both a philosopher and a mathematician who wrote primarily in
Ralf Dahrendorf Ralf Dahrendorf Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, (1 May 1929 – 17 June 2009) was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician. A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analyzing class divisions in modern society, and is regarded as "one of the most influential thinkers of his generation." Dahrendorf wrote multiple articles and books, his most notable being "Class Conflict in Industrial Society" (1959) and "Essays in the Theory of Society" (1968). During his political career, he was a Member of the German Parliament, Parliamentary Secretary of State at the Foreign Office of