Plan for blog entry: History of Modern Philosophy

What I have slowly come to realise - after having read Sophie's World and hearing the history of Jewish philosophers since Kant in 1 hour - is that a lot has happened in between Kant and now, that is usually taken for granted i.e. the whole split between continental and analytic philosophy. At the moment, my understanding of how this split happens, who is involved and what the main points of departure are; is very blurred. I have thus been incredibly unsuccessful in my former resolution to try to learn Levinas. Atm, I know thus much:

• Aristotle laid down a system of logic back in his day mostly unchanged till 19th century
• Leibniz did some unrecognized work on mathematical logic in 17th century
• In late 19th century (time of German Idealist view that maths and science are products of the mind and Husserlian phenomenology), Gottlob Frege made significant progress with mathematical logic, seeing it as objective (existing independent of human thought) and thus more useful for understanding the world than the prevalent Cartesian focus on epistemology 'what can we know?'
• In England, Bertrand Russell developed & popularised Frege's work, and taught Wittgenstein. People now analysed 'What are we really saying when we say so-and-so?'
• Both Russell and Wittgenstein's work heavily influenced a group of guys called 'the Vienna Circle' popular in the 30s.
• Ernst Cassirer (a major German philosopher who studied with Herman Cohen and developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded on a phenomenology of knowledge) and Heidegger (another German known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being") had a massive debate once in Davos.
  
• This debate was attended by Levinas (who afterwards reenacted the debate playing as Cassirer). He said of it “a young student could have had the impression that he was witness to the creation and the end of the world.”
• Rudolf Carnap (a member of the Vienna Circle) also attended that debate and went on to wage a notorious attack on Heidegger's philosophy. He was a great influence on the famous analytic philosopher Quine.
• To be continued...
  

I am now setting upon myself the task of struggling through books like '12 Modern Philosophers' and 'Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos' and Wiki trips on logical-positivism and ne0-Kantianism and Berkeley webcasts on existential-phenomenology, philosophy of mind and anthropology, until I can sort of get it. Then, I will hopefully be able to neatly summarise the story here, 'Sophie's World'-style. Please comment so as to make me feel like posting this served some purpose (i.e. revealing to me the uselessness of such information)