PHIL 291

PHIL 291: Existentialism
Instructors: Vladimir Dukic

Course Description:

Although many best-known themes of existentialist philosophy can be traced to 19th and early 20th century writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, existentialism came into sharp focus in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. For millions across Europe, the manifest inhumanity and utter senselessness of war shattered all confidence in religious, philosophical, and scientific certainties, so that even among liberated peoples, hard-won freedoms of thought and action were accompanied by a profound crisis of meaning. To many, the revelation of the scale and extent of human suffering in the Holocaust could not be reconciled with one’s faith in the existence of a benevolent God and the sanctity of human life, while the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast a menacing shadow on the relentless march of technological and scientific progress. Against this background, notions of anxiety in the face of nothingness, the specter of nihilism and the death of God, as well as the question of the meaning of being could not be contained in lecture halls and seminar rooms but acquired a renewed urgency and personal significance. It is in this context that a new generation of existentialists, including Simone de Beauvoir, Keiji Nishitani, Franz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre, staged an uncompromising defense of human freedom and the irreducible singularity of human existence while also affirming absolute responsibility to oneself and to others. And although the horrors of the Second World War may appear as a distant historical memory, such reflections on the perennial question of what it means to be human are as timely as ever in our own age of rising political authoritarianism, recalcitrant systemic injustice, looming ecological catastrophe, and social technologies that present new challenges to freedoms of thought and individual expression.