PHIL 120
Existentialism: An Introduction Spring 2014
Division II Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Existentialism is considered to be one of the 20th century’s most important philosophical movements, with key figures such as Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. In the aftermath of Nietzsche’s famous claim that God is dead, together with the sensation of a loss of a foundation for human and moral values after the two world wars, existentialism seeks to examine the philosophical and ethical conditions for human existence that can no longer take transcendent foundations for granted. What becomes of moral responsibility, if no moral values are absolutely given? What is freedom, if no longer granted by divine or human essence? How can meaning be created, and on what grounds, if no higher meaning is given anymore? In this course, we will explore a number of existentialist questions and themes, such as meaning, nihilism, humanism, the absurd and anguish, but also hope, ethics and intersubjectivity through various texts by such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Heidegger and Arendt, and also through literature and films inspired by or inspiring for the existentialist movement: Beckett, Kafka, Dostoievski and Bergman among others.