It's such a wide set of authors that any ELI5 is going to fall very short (kind of like saying "can anyone explain 20th century European literature to me?") but

It's such a wide set of authors that any ELI5 is going to fall very short (kind of like saying "can anyone explain 20th century European literature to me?") but the Wikipedia for continental philosophy is a tolerable intro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy Of course, actually reading Nietzsche or something would be better but that's not really an ELI5.