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As a loose philosophical school, some persons associated with existentialism explicitly rejected the label (e.g. Martin Heidegger ), and others are not remembered primarily as philosophers, but as writers ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky) or theologians ( Paul Tillich ).
NameLivedNationalityOccupationJuly 15, 1901 – September 9, 1990ItalyPhilosopherJanuary 18, 1931 – September 25, 1976ColombiaPhilosopherOctober 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975GermanyPhilosopherFebruary 17, 1917 – July 25, 2002EgyptPhilosopher- At The Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell
- Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, by Walter Kaufmann
- The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, by Steven Crowell
- Either/Or, by Søren Kierkegaard
- Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir
- Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger
- The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
- Further Reading
Published in 2016, Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Caféis a fantastic place to start for anyone with a budding interest in existentialism. With brilliant narrative storytelling, Bakewell outlines the intersecting lives and philosophies of key existentialist figures — from Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, to Husserl, Heidegger, and Camus. ...
Walter Kaufmann was a 20th-century philosopher, poet, and renowned translator of Friedrich Nietzsche (see our reading list on Nietzsche’s best books here). In his 1956 Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Kaufmann assembles extracts from key existentialist influencers and thinkers including Dostoevsky (see Dostoevsky’s best books here), Kierke...
If you’re seeking to complement Kaufmann's existentialist anthology with some hardcore critical analysis, look no further than philosophy professor Steven Crowell’s The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, published in 2012. In this volume of original essays, Crowell brings together a team of distinguished commentators to discuss the ideas of Kie...
Turning from introductions and anthologies to primary existentialist texts, where better to start than with the philosopher often regarded as the precursor to the movement as a whole? In his 1843 epic Either/Or (which also features in our reading list of Kierkegaard’s best books), the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard discusses the search for a ...
Arguably the cornerstone of existentialist thinking, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s epic 1943 Being and Nothingness— coming in at over 800 pages — is a dense, vivid, and challenging depiction of human existence, and the most explicit expression of existentialist philosophy on this list. If you’re seeking a less daunting introduction to Sartr...
In her classic 1947 introduction to existentialist thinking, The Ethics of Ambiguity, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir critiques the positions of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and sets out to provide a new ethics for existentialism. In clear, accessible, insightful prose, Beauvoir provides novel arguments for and developments of existentialism, an...
Throughout the history of philosophy, argues the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, we’ve all massively missed something: we’ve never really contemplated what it means to exist, to be. The philosophical branch of metaphysics has skimmed over this question, focusing instead on things like substance and the categories of our experience; but behind ...
Though the French thinker Albert Camus rejected the label ‘existentialist’, his writings are widely considered core to the existentialist tradition. His particular brand of existentialism, dubbed ‘absurdism’, explores how even in the face of the outrageous absurdity of the human condition, we can salvage meaning and happiness. In his hugely influen...
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Jan 6, 2023 · The existentialist’s distinction between the object-body and the lived-body has made it possible for contemporary philosophers and social theorists to engage the lived experience of those who have been historically marginalized by the western tradition.
- Phenomenology. Phenomenology is a philosophical movement developed by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century and later adapted by Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and others.
- Freedom. If the principle of phenomenology gave existentialism its basic shape — i.e. a technique for getting at how things really are, for going behind the stale categorizations of common sense and natural science to describe human existence for what it really is — then the principle of freedom gave existentialism its founding value.
- Authenticity. Finally, once we’ve acknowledged the importance of the first-person perspective, and recognized the ultimate freedom we have in our lived existence moment-to-moment, we come to another core principle of existentialist philosophy: adopting a stance of authenticity.
Rooted in the writings of existentialist thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, existentialism challenges conventional notions of meaning, identity, and morality, inviting individuals to confront the fundamental questions of existence and to embrace the complexities of human life with c...
Albert Camus, a French philosopher, is widely considered an existentialist, although he might have disagreed; he promoted a unique kind of existentialism called absurdism. This short quote sums up the idea pretty well. Sisyphus was a character in Greek mythology, a man condemned to Hades by the gods.
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Next, we’ll look at some of the most influential proponents of Existentialism many of whom were existentialist philosophers long before the term was Existentialism came into vogue in the Left-bank cafés of Paris.
