Postwar West German philosophy was dominated by Heidegger and existentialism, not positivism

Evidence

When Adorno was finally able to publish his studies on Husserl, two decades after they had been written, there had been no fundamental change in the philosophical scene in (West) Germany since the 1920s and early 1930s. After the war, the scene was dominated by Heidegger and a new variation of `material phenomenology’, French existentialism, with Sartre as its best-known representative. A further variant of existential philosophy was provided by Jaspers. Plessner, Gehlen and Schelsky were powerful representatives of the philosophical anthropology that was influential in sociology at the time. By contrast, neopositivism and critical philosophy, the worst affected by expulsions from Germany under fascism, still had to regain ground. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 562

Categorization

• XREF: The philosophical-anthropology figures Plessner, Gehlen, and Schelsky recur throughout this book’s account of postwar German sociology.