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Foundational figure of existentialism, Christian existentialist Ladislav Klíma: August 8, 1878 – April 19, 1928 Czechoslovakia Philosopher, novelist Also associated with subjective idealism: Emmanuel Levinas: January 12, 1906 – December 25, 1995 Lithuania, France Philosopher, theologian Studied with Heidegger and Husserl John Macquarrie
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 Café is 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, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, to Husserl, Heidegger, and Cam...
Walter Kaufmann was a 20th-century philosopher, poet, and renowned translator of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1956 Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Kaufmann assembles extracts from key existentialist influencers and thinkers including Dostoevsky (see our reading list on Dostoevsky’s best books here), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (see our reading ...
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 outlines her position in relation to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and argues that in order to achieve true freedom, we must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The book that launched de Beauvoir’s ...
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 · Beginning with Hubert Dreyfus’s (1972) groundbreaking critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI), philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have been drawing on existentialist philosophy—especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—to challenge the overly mentalistic picture of selfhood and agency that modern philosophy inherits from ...
- 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.
Sep 28, 2023 · Existentialism is a 20th century school of thought that encompasses a wide range of contemporary thinkers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Gabriel Marcel. Despite their profound differences, all of them seek to understand the issue of human existence, which makes up the essence of man in his own singularity.
Although there is no single doctrine common to all and only existentialists, existentialism is a philosophical movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe loosely held together by addressing fundamental questions about human existence. For example: Am I free? Am I responsible for my actions? Is life meaningful, or absurd?
These beliefs are often accompanied by actions. The philosophy is widely held among philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, Carl Jung, and Martin Heidegger. There are three primary branches of existentialist thought. Some existentialists are religious moralists, agnostic relativists, and atheists.