PHIL 225
Existentialism Spring 2024
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

We will study the philosophical and literary works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus. One of our guiding questions will be: What makes a thinker an “Existentialist”? The answer is not merely that they ask the question, “What gives meaning to a human life?” And, it’s not merely that their answer invokes our freedom to determine our own identities. More than this, Existentialists emphasize the subjective relation we bear to our belief systems, moral codes, and personal identities. Existentialists investigate deeply irrational phenomena of human life, including anxiety, boredom, tragedy, melancholy, despair, death, faith, sexuality, love, alienation, hate, sadism, masochism, and authenticity. And, Existentialists express their thought in philosophical treatises as often as in literary works. In this course we will seek to comprehend the dimensions in which Existentialism is a distinctive intellectual tradition.