20th-century German philosophers

Helmuth Plessner (4 September 1892, Wiesbaden – 12 June 1985, Göttingen) was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology".

Rudolf Pannwitz (27 May 1881 in Crossen/Oder, Province of Brandenburg, Prussia – 23 March 1969 in Astano, Ticino, Switzerland) was a German writer, poet and philosopher. His thought combined nature philosophy, Nietzsche, an opposition to nihilism and pan-European internationalism: Pannwitz's elusive, difficult goal may be seen as the complete re-evaluation of man, art, science and culture envisaged as the expression of an evolving cosmos obeying the laws of eternal recurrence, with Nietzsche-Zarathustra as the supreme prophet.

Moritz Geiger (26 June 1880 – 9 September 1937) was a German philosopher and a disciple of Edmund Husserl. He was a member of the Munich phenomenological school. Beside phenomenology, he dedicated himself to psychology, epistemology and aesthetics.

Norbert Elias (German: [ˈnɔʁbɛʁt ʔeˈliːas]; 22 June 1897 – 1 August 1990) was a German sociologist who later became a British citizen. He is especially famous for his theory of civilizing/decivilizing processes.

Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (15 September 1880, in Stettin (Szczecin) – 28 July 1949, in Tübingen) was a German religious psychologist and philosopher.
Oesterreich was also interested in parapsychology. He argued against the philosophy of materialism.He was the author of Die Besessenheit (1921), a book on demonic possession. It was translated into English in 1966. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, was influenced by the book.

Julius Guttmann (Hebrew: יוליוס גוטמן), born Yitzchak Guttmann (15 April 1880 in Hildesheim – 19 May 1950 in Jerusalem), was a German-born rabbi, Jewish theologian, and philosopher of religion.

Max Bense (7 February 1910 in Strasbourg – 29 April 1990 in Stuttgart) was a German philosopher, writer, and publicist, known for his work in philosophy of science, logic, aesthetics, and semiotics. His thoughts combine natural sciences, art, and philosophy under a collective perspective and follow a definition of reality, which – under the term existential rationalism – is able to remove the separation between humanities and natural sciences.

Ernst Philipp Barthel (17 October 1890 in Schiltigheim - 16 February 1953 in Oberkirch (Baden)) was an Alsace philosopher, mathematician, and inventor.In the 1920s and 1930s he taught as a Privatdozent of philosophy at the University of Cologne. From 1924 on Barthel edited the magazine Antäus. Blätter für neues Wirklichkeitsdenken (Journal for new Reality Thinking), which served as the organ of the Gesellschaft für Lebensphilosophie (Society for Life Philosophy) founded by him in Cologne.
Barthel maintained philosophical friendships with his compatriots Albert Schweitzer and Friedrich Lienhard.

Hans Blumenberg (born 13 July 1920, Lübeck – 28 March 1996, Altenberge) was a German philosopher and intellectual historian.
He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics (1939–47, interrupted by World War II) and is considered to be one of the most important German philosophers of the century. He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge (near Münster), Germany.
Blumenberg created what has come to be called "metaphorology", which states that what lies under metaphors and language modisms, is the nearest to the truth (and the farthest from ideologies). His last works, especially "Care Crosses the River" (Die Sorge geht über den Fluss), are attempts to apprehend human reality through its metaphors and involuntary expressions. Digging under apparently meaningless anecdotes of the history of occidental thought and literature, Blumenberg drew a map of the expressions, examples, gestures, that flourished in the discussions of what are thought to be more important matters. Blumenberg's interpretations are extremely unpredictable and personal, all full of signs, indications and suggestions, sometimes ironic. Above all, it is a warning against the force of revealed truth, and for the beauty of a world in confusion.

Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch (28 October 1867 – 17 April 1941) was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He has also been credited with performing the first artificial 'cloning' of an animal in the 1880s, although this claim is dependent on how one defines cloning.