The Continental Thread: A Narrative Review of Phenomenology, Existentialism, Critical Theory, and Post-Structuralism
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Continental philosophy is the century's other tradition: phenomenology's return to the things themselves in Husserl's 1913 Ideen and Heidegger's 1927 Sein und Zeit, existentialism's freedom and absurd in Sartre and Camus, critical theory's enlightenment critique in the Frankfurt School, structuralism's sign systems in Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, and post-structuralism's dispersions in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that thread, from Husserl's 1913 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and Saussure's 1916 Cours, through Heidegger's 1927 Sein und Zeit, Camus's 1942 Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Sartre's 1943 L'Être et le Néant, Horkheimer and Adorno's 1947 Dialektik der Aufklärung, Marcuse's 1964 One-Dimensional Man, Lévi-Strauss's 1962 La Pensée sauvage, Foucault's 1966 Les Mots et les Choses, Derrida's 1967 De la Grammatologie, Deleuze and Guattari's 1972 L'Anti-Œdipe, closing with Habermas's 1981 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, the tradition's rationalist rejoinder. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the subject's philosophy, in which phenomenology and existentialism re-grounded truth and freedom in existence; the system's critique, in which the Frankfurt School and the structuralists displaced the subject toward society and sign; and the structure's dispersions, in which post-structuralism dissolved the displacements—and Habermas's communication reconstructed the reason they questioned. It is concluded that the continental thread's history is the subject's serial reconfiguration—and that its schools, however opposed, share the critique's method.
Authors: Revista, Zen, PHILOSOPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204657123