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
Philosophy and literature narrative "Philosophus Autodidactus" as a response to al-Ghazali's "The Incoherence of the Philosophers", and then the 13th century Islamic theologian-philosopher Ibn al-Nafis also wrote a fictional narrative "Theologus Autodidactus" as a response to Abubacer's "Philosophus Autodidactus". The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche often articulated his ideas in literary modes, most notably in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", a re-imagined account of the teachings of Zoroaster. Marquis de Sade and Ayn Rand wrote novels in which characters served as mouthpieces for philosophical positions, and act in accordance with them in the plot. George Santayana was also a philosopher who wrote novels and poetry; the