Existentialism :: essays research papers

existential philosophyLike "rationalism" and "empiricism," " existential philosophy" is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its commentary is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophic output of Sartre and his associates nonably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus existentialism became determine with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the forties and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom for instance Camus and Heidegger repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel wave in France, the Spaniards Jos Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nicholai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophic one. Sartres own ideas were and are better known through his fictional flora (such as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophic ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar days found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked on a lower floor the term retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted in Paris there were Jean Genet, Andr Gide, Andr Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett the Norwegian Knut Hamsen and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club artists such as Alberto Giacommeti and even scam Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a clich, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an recognisable philosophical position or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartres philosophy alone. nevertheless while a philosophical definition of existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural fate of the term, and while Sartres thought moldiness loom large in any account of existentialism, the concept does pull out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as theology (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss to Otto Rank, R.