Along with a loss of faith in reason and science, the twentieth century witnessed a loss of faith in the human self and society as a whole. Two devastating world wars left scant reason for Enlightenment optimism. Commencing with Frege, Husserl and Bergson, Alan Padgett and Steve Wilkens chart the course of twentieth-century philosophy on its journey toward postmodernism. The voyage is not a straight-line affair. Questions of language and meaning in the tradition of Russell and Moore, Which reached its apex in Wittgenstein, follow a stream unlike the continental philosophy dominated by Heidegger. This latter stream of continental philosophy comprises a delta of philosophical movements, including phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, Marxism, critical theory and poststructuralism and brings to the fore such thinkers as Foucault, Derrida and Rorty. As in the previous volume, Christianity & Western Thought, Volume 2, Padgett and Wilkens prove able guides, assisting us in understanding the various currents and landscapes along the way. Book jacket.