preview

Existentialism : What 's It All About And Who Cares?

Best Essays

“Existentialism: What’s It All About & Who Cares?”
Patrick Jemmer

Swansea Philosophy Café: Wednesday 9 January 2013

How can we classify it? Existentialism maps out a believable and engaging “blueprint” for living a “good life,” rather than being a single, unified, and unchanging “school” of philosophical doctrine. We could say that is a way of life for individuals bold enough not to “prefer a handful of ‘certainty’ to a cartful of beautiful possibilities.”
How did it start? We might see Existentialism as originating with the Ancient Greeks who asked the all-embracing question, “What is the good life?” Over a thousand years later, after the “Enlightenment,” thee ideas were refined and extended. Hume (1711 – 1776) began to investigate the nature of science, and to ask “What is it to know anything?” Kant (1724 – 1804) was trying to explain the basic, general relationships between the reasoning human mind and experience. Hegel’s (1770 – 1831) “phenomenological” or “self-observational” investigations into the nature and operation of the human mind produced a vast theoretical "system” explaining the links between the subject and object of knowledge, between human consciousness and its environment, and gave a general framework for understanding art, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, and religion.
How did it develop? Next came, for example, Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), Jaspers (1883 – 1969), Heidegger (1889 – 1976), Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961),

Get Access