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Existentialism, philosophicalmovement or tendency, emphasizing individual existence, freedom, and choice, that influenced many diverse writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Because of the diversity of positions associated with existentialism, the term is impossible to define precisely.

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who was the first writer to call himself existential, reacted against this tradition by insisting that the highest good for the individual is to find his or her own unique vocation.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it.

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.

Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God.

Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative ethics; however, a certain approach to the theory of value and to moral psychology, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in situation, are distinctive marks of the existentialisttradition.

From this point of view, the substantive "histories" adopted by existential thinkers as different as Heidegger and Sartre should perhaps be read less as scientific accounts, defensible in third-person terms, than as articulations of the historical situation from the perspective of what that situation is taken to demand, given the engaged commitment of their authors.

The various forms of Existentialism may also be distinguished on the basis of language, which is an indication of the cultural traditions to which they belong and which often explains the differences in terminology among the various authors.

Existentialism was moved to insist on the instability and the risk of all human reality, to acknowledge that man is "thrown into the world"--i.e., abandoned to a determinism that could render his initiatives impossible--and to hold that his very freedom is conditioned and hampered by limitations that could at any moment render it empty.

Existentialism is never a solipsism in the proper sense of the term (that I alone exist), because every existential possibility relates man to things and to other men.

Existentialism is much like Transcendentalism and Feminism – there are several kinds of existentialism and what one says of one kind may not be true of another.

Today we have existentialMarxism, existential sociology, existential psychoanalysis, existential theology…the general feature of these hybrids is an emphasis on the irreducibility of the perspective of human agents, whose activities, emotions, and thoughts are understood in terms of their aspiration to become an individual.

Existentialism insists upon reuniting the lower or irrational parts of the psyche with the higher.

Existentialism may be explained according to the themes and concerns of its proponents.

Even the term "orthodox existentialism" is a problem since the field is so diverse and the prominent existential thinkers don't agree about what existentialism is. Nevertheless, religious existentialists are concerned with some of the same themes as are non-religious existentialists.

ExistentialTheology does not and cannot exist, but existential theologians should exist, that is theologians whose chief interest does not lie in dogmatics and in the external observance of rituals, but in the souls of men, in their predicament and in the willingness to help them.

The site is primarily aimed at those hitherto unacquainted with the basics of existentialism and phenomenology, and offers helpful summary definitions of the two schools of thought, as well as elementary accounts of some of their essential themes.

Basic Themes of Existentialism: The Bare Essentials for the Mind-on-Fire, a quick overview of some of the basic, ever-winding, rivers that run through Existentialism and the human experience; love, anxiety, stress, solitude, relationships, failure, sadness, death, loneliness, human frailty etc. A very meaty section in the Realm of Existentialism, and frequently up-dated!

The allure of Existentialism lies in its ability to grapple, in a non-trivial way, with so many common although philosophically underrated aspects of human condition: anxiety, anguish, dread, despair, boredom, guilt, loneliness, forlornness, lack of meaning, self-deception, suicide, death, suffering, finitude.

The former is widely recognized as the major precursor of Existentialism (in fact, its fountainhead) while the latter is arguably the pivotal figure of its rise to the most influential philosophicalmovement in the mid-twentieth century.

The principal objective in this course is to become acquainted with the challenge that Existentialism poses to Modern Philosophy by denying the substantial character of the Self and the Truth.

Existentialism is the philosophy that places emphasis on individual existence, freedom, and choice.

Existentialism stresses the individuality of existence, and the problems that arise with said existence.

What is meant by this is that existentialism gives priority in signifigance to existence, in the sense of my existence as a conscious subject, rather than to any essence which may be assigned to me, any definition of me, any explination of me by science or philosophy or religion or politics.

Jean-Paul Sartre originally defined the word existentialism, and applied it to lots of people who never knew they were existentialists and who held a range of conflicting ideas on a variety of topics, the existence of godbeing one such debated topic.

Existentialism is a very influential philosophy that went through periods where it greatly affected politics and pop-culture, and is still very popular in certain circles.

They look at how existentialism can be useful in psychiatry, and how the issues people desire to address in psychotherapy are often of anexistential nature, like life, death, and meaning.

www.philosophytalk.org /pastShows/Existentialism.html (419 words)

Existentialsim by Roger Jones(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)

The roots of existentialism began with Kierkegaard in the first half of the 19th century.

Although elements of existentialism occasionally appear in public schools, this philosophy has found wider acceptance in private schools and ill alternative public schools founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s.