Existentialism

This study guide offers an exploration of the 20th Century Philosophy which claimed that “existence precedes essence”, or, in effect, that men and women define their own being through their acts and choices.

The Book

After an Introduction examining the historical moment of Existentialism, as a product of wartime discipline and consciousness, this book sets out the thinking of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (with a glance at other thinkers in the Existentialist tradition) on the broad questions of "What is Man?” “What Can I Know?” and “What must I do?”

It introduces models of Abandonment, The Absurd and Ambiguity; Consciousness and Freedom; Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself, Bad Faith, Facticity and Possibility, Dasein, or there-being, Temporality, attitudes towards Death; The Will-to-Power, The Superman, and the so-called Kingdom of Ends. The book glances throughout at literary contributions to Existentialism, and ends with brief biographies of the major Existentialists and an extensive glossary of terms.

About the author

Richard Gravil taught in the University of Victoria, B.C., the University of Lodz, Poland, and the University of Otago, New Zealand. His books include Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862, (St Martin's, 2000) Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 (Palgrave, 2003), and five edited works including Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Ashgate, 2001) and (with Molly Lefebure) The Coleridge Connection. (Both of these collections are available from Humanities Ebooks). He was the founder of Humanities-Ebooks LLP and Academic Convenor of the Wordsworth Winter School and Summer Conference.