PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT

A 'philosophical movement' is either the appearance or increased popularity of a specific school of philosophy, or a fairly broad but identifiable sea-change in philosophical thought on a particular subject. Major philosophical movements are often characterized with reference to the nation, language, or historical era in which they arose.
Talk of a philosophical movement can often function as a shorthand for talk of the views of a great number of different philosophers (and others associated with philosophy, such as historians, artists, scientists and political figures). On the other hand, most philosophical movements in history consisted in a great number of individual thinkers who disagreed in various ways; it is often inaccurate and something of a caricature to treat any movement as consisting in followers of uniform opinion. More often the defining ideas of any philosophical movement are templates on which individual thinkers develop their own particular ideas.
Like specific doctrines and theories, movements are often given names with "ism" suffixes. What makes a movement identifiable and interesting as distinct from a specific theory is simply that a movement consists in a large flourishing of intellectual work on one or more ideas, in a fairly specifiable time and place. Following is short list of major philosophical movements, in rough chronological order:

Contents

The ancient world

The middle ages

The modern world

Movements in Eastern and African philosophies

The ancient world

★ Cynicism

★ Epicureanism

★ Hedonism

★ Neoplatonism

★ Pythagoreanism

★ Platonic realism

★ Pyrrhonian skepticism

★ Pre-Socratic philosophy

★ Stoicism

★ Sophism

The middle ages

★ Averroism

★ Mu'tazilite

★ Scholasticism

★ Thomism

The modern world

★ Analytic Philosophy -- Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, W. V. O. Quine

★ Continental Philosophy

★ Critical theory (Frankfurt School) -- see also Critical theory

★ Deconstructivism -- Jacques Derrida

★ Empiricism, dominant in Britain following Hobbes

★ The Enlightenment which drew attention to the importance of science and reason to human life

★ Existentialism -- Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

★ French materialism

★ German idealism -- Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel

★ Hermeneutics -- Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer

★ Logicism -- Gottlob Frege

★ Logical Positivism (with the Vienna Circle, Logical atomism (Russell), and Ideal language philosophy (Wittgenstein))

★ Marxism

★ Modernism (more a movement in the arts, but worth noting for its connection with below)

★ Ordinary language philosophy

★ Objectivist movement –– Ayn Rand

★ Phenomenology -- Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

★ Postmodern philosophy -- see also Postmodernism

★ Poststructuralism

★ Romanticism

★ Rationalism, dominant on continental Europe following Descartes

★ Structuralism

★ Utilitarianism -- Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill

★ Post Philosophy
The Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romanticism are broader cultural "movements" that happened to characterised by fairly distinctive philosophical concerns.

Movements in Eastern and African philosophies

See Eastern philosophy for a list of Asian philosophical movements.
See African philosophy for a list of African philosophical movements.