Comrades

Wilhelm Dilthey

This guy brought my work into the 20th Century. He was invested in placing philosophy, history, and other studies in the humanities on equal footing with the "hard" sciences. He decided that, when talking about nature, philosophers fall into one of three camps: naturalists, idealists of freedom, and objective idealists.

Apparently, he saw me as an objective idealist because I think of humans as being one with nature. After all, we're all made of that reason stuff.

Francis Fukuyama

My work had political ramifications all over the place—even on thinkers behind major 21st century wars. Who said philosophy had no bearing on real life?

Alexandre Kojève

Gotta love Kojève's lectures. Well, I do, at any rate, because so many of them are about me. Pretty much every great thinker of the 20th century attended Kojève's lectures and his interpretation of my work has trickled down through Kojève and into their theories.

And I ain't sweatin' no small thinkers here; I'm saying I've had influence on the biggies like Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille.

György Lukács

He's like the Hungarian me. But I think my favorite thing about him is that he wrote The Young Hegel.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I can't even believe I got this guy on my team. Even if he is an existentialist, he's so smooth—angry and bitter, yes—but smooth. I'm pretty sure I owe my Sartre win to the fact that he was a devotee of Kojève and attended his weekly lectures, too.

Slavoj Žižek

He's like a modern-day rock-star of philosophy. He's got lots of strong feelings about politics, but is less concerned with creating his own system of thought than examining the work of others. Hats off to you, Mr. Žižek.

Rivals

Gilles Deleuze

What a Deleuz-er. Okay, okay, low blow, but the guy needs to ease up on me and my interest in history. He thinks my interest in history shackles people, like we're stuck in the Dark Ages or something.

Martin Heidegger

This guy totally misses my point, but it's cool: Žižek's got my back. I don't really care about what Heidegger thinks anyway. His biggest work, Being and Time, is the reason why philosophers get mocked for asking, "What does it mean to be?" Lol.

Betrand Russell

This guy was all over my theories in his early career, but then new analytic theory put me on the back burner. As everyone was getting all excited about neo analyzing people, my ideas were getting associated with the same kinds of beliefs that fueled the world wars. Not cool, bro.

It's Complicated With

Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels

They're all: "We inverted Hegel's dialectic." Thanks, I guess? I suppose that means they're on board with my basic ideologies, but with a couple of materialist caveats.

Friedrich Schelling

He's, like, my mentor. But also my rival and my successor, all at the same time. It's just… weird. Let's not get into it.