Summary Framing the evolution of post-Enlightenment philosophy, Contemporary Thought begins with a discussion of the British Empiricists and Kant’s analysis of the capacity of reason. Biographies and examinations of the Idealists, Materialists, Utilitarians, Individualists, Analytics, Phenomenologists, and Existentialists reveal how philosophers from each of these schools of thought sought to explain the increasingly more secular and industrialized world of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. These thinkers’ conclusions prove that modern-day philosophy has continued to deepen and expand human knowledge.