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34 - Existentialism

from Part VI - Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Intellectual and Artistic Currents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2021

Michael Ruse
By
Gary Foster
Edited by
Stephen Bullivant
Michael Ruse
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Stephen Bullivant
Affiliation:
St Mary's University, Twickenham, London
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Summary

“Existence precedes essence.” The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would use this phrase to characterize existentialism and limit the extension of the term in his essay “Existentialism is a humanism,” which was first published in 1946. He had already used the phrase in his major work Being and Nothingness, originally published in 1943, but it is in the later work that he would use it to define the “movement.” This proposition is less of a doctrinal statement then it is a characterization of a way of thinking or of an attitude toward life.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Atheism , pp. 616 - 631
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

References

Beauvoir, S. de. 1976 [1948]. The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press.Google Scholar
Bergoffen, D. B. 2002. “Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: woman, man, and the desire to be God.” Constellations, 9(3), 409–18.Google Scholar
Camus, A. 1975. The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. J. O’Brien. Markham, ON: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. 1962 [1927]. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. 1977 [1947]. “Letter on humanism,” trans. F. A. Capuzzi, in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. Krell, D. F.. New York: Harper and Row, 189–242.Google Scholar
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Nietzsche, F. 2001. The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sartre, J.-P. 1956 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.Google Scholar
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Suggestions for Further Reading

Camus, A. 1965. Notebooks: 1942–1951, trans. J. O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Come, A. B. 1995. Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering Myself. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press.Google Scholar
de Beauvoir, S. 1989. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. Parshley, H. M.. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Hannay, A. 2018. Søren Kierkegaard. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hannay, A. and Marino, G. D. (eds.) 1998. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. 1977. Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. Krell, D. F.. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Howells, C. (ed.) 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, F. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Toronto: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Sartre, J.-P. 1992. Notebook for an Ethics, trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Webber, J. 2018. Rethinking Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

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