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
Being in itself 'Being in itself' to be at the same time the most vague and general concept possible to contemplate, but also the topic of greatest interest to him as a philosopher. In Sartrean existentialism, being-in-itself ("être-en-soi") is also contrasted with the being of persons, which he describes as a combination of, or vacillation or tension between, being-for-itself ("être-pour-soi") and being-for-others ("I'être-pour-autrui"). Being-in-itself refers to objects in the external world — a mode of existence that simply is. It is not conscious so it is neither active nor passive and harbors no potentiality for transcendence. This mode of being is relevant to