Existentialism

Existentialism is an approach to philosophical questions that can be found in the writings of Nineteenth Century authors such as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, and more explicitly in Twentieth Century Philosophers Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. Existentialist thought focuses on the meaning-for our individual lives-of lived experience, value, freedom, responsibility, and commitment, and is often associated with an ethics of authenticity. In this unit we will consider a selection of writings by these authors, looking at how existentialist ideas have been represented in both philosophy and literature.

The unit aims to:

• Introduce students to the philosophical writings of Nineteenth & Twentieth Century existentialists;
• Present the historical, philosophical, and literary context in which existentialism was developed;
• Explore in detail some central concepts of existentialism: meaning, value, lived experience, authenticity, mortality, etc;
• Show how existentialism relates to issues in ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind.  

One two-hour lecture and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Students should be able to:

• Identify the main philosophical questions arising in a variety of texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon;
• Compare and clearly articulate existentialist philosophical claims in their own words.

Students should be able to:

• Evaluate the claims and arguments of key existentialists;
• Read, interpret and criticise both primary and secondary texts on existentialism;
• Relate existentialist philosophy to other areas of philosophical inquiry, comparing and evaluating different philosophical approaches.

Students should be able to:

• Use research tools to effectively select resources in the preparation of assessments on existentialism;
• Clearly communicate ideas about existentialism. 

Essay (2000 words) 50%

Exam (2 hours) 50%

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate time is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Canvas; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

• Smith, Joel. 2022. Existentialism: A Philosophical Inquiry. London: Routledge 
• Webber, Jonathan. 2018. Rethinking Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
• Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.). 2006. A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Oxford: Blackwell. 
• Daigle, Christine. 2010. Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Routledge. 
• Arp, Kristina. 2001. The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics. La Salle, IL: Open Court.