________, the leading philosopher of the twentieth century, made significant contributions as a playwright, novelist, journalist, and literary critic.
Art critic Harold Rosenberg's understanding of Abstract Expressionist painting was powerfully shaped by Existentialism. The philosophy played an important role in framing Rosenberg's notion of Action Painting.. Soeren Søren kierkegaard And Friedrich nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist, movement though neither used the term existentialism and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th. century Although many outside Scandinavia consider the term existentialism to have originated from Kierkegaard himself, it is more likely that Kierkegaard adopted this term (or at least the term existential as a description of his philosophy) from the Norwegian poet and literary critic Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven. Existentialism first emerged in the late 19th century, in the writing of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who reacted against the systematic and rational character of Hegel's philosophy and instead insisted on the distinctiveness of personal experience. Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology. Although the term Existentialism was coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the 20th century, its roots reach far back; one can even find traces of it in the thought of the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who argued that mankind was defined by universal qualities. Although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term existentialism for his own philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as almost diametrically opposed to that of Sartre. Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929. Sartre's activity as a playwright, novelist and literary critic gave his ideas extraordinary reach; his novel Nausea (1938) was particularly important in this regard. Sartre even occasionally wrote essays about artists' work, such as Giacometti, which aided in translating philosophy into the terms of visual art. In fact, while existentialism is generally considered to have originated with Kierkegaard, the first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term as a self-description was Jean-Paul Sartre. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a twentieth-century French phenomenological philosopher. Highly influenced by the writings and theories and Marx, Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty examined the structures of human consciousness, and how things such as art, literature and the sciences affect these structures.
Sartre