Existentialism :: essays research papers

Existentialism the like "rationalism" and "empiricism," "experientialism" is a endpoint that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is gum olibanum to some extent unmatched of historical convenience. The term was explicitly select as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophic push throughput of Sartre and his associates notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus existential philosophy became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the study philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom for instance Camus and Heidegger repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards Jos Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nicholai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosop hers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartres own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works (such(prenominal) as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years tack a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted in Paris there were Jean Genet, Andr Gide, Andr Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett the Norwegian Knut Hamsen and the Rumanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club artists such as Alberto Giacommeti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of exis tentialism had befit a clich, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartres philosophy alone. But dapple a philosophical definition of existentialism may not wholly ignore the cultural fate of the term, and while Sartres thought must cover large in any account of existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as righteousness (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss to Otto Rank, R.