Stephen Small on defining other people and ourselves. We live our lives in the shadow of other people. Others fill and to a significant degree constitute our world. After many centuries of history we remain social animals, but our identity and its origins remain an issue for us. Although we easily imagine ourselves alone on …
Ion Georgiou explains the literary theories of a man who loved words. “A writer writes to a great extent to be read (as for those who say they don’t, let us admire them but not believe them).” Albert Camus It has been said of Monsieur Sartre – and it remains undoubtedly true – that the …
Michael Rockler scrutinizes the private investigator’s existentialist credentials. Perhaps the most popular existential work of the 20th century was written by a man who has not usually been identified as a philosopher, but whose work clearly embodies existential themes. Dashiell Hammett, creator of the hard-boiled detective novel, applied an existential viewpoint to his writing. His …
Jonathan Rée on Søren Kierkegaard and the struggle to become a real thinker. I am not a Christian, but in some ways I wish I was. Of course Christianity can be tiresome (as all Christians would agree) but it can also be fresh and crisply intelligent. And I find it hard to resist Christianity as …
Understanding the imagination was central to Sartre’s attempts to understand what it is to be human, and how we should live. Maria Antonietta Perna thinks he had important insights which are still worth considering. What is imagination? The word itself seems to be used in at least two different ways, and as this ambiguity is …
Matthew Coniam on Colin Wilson. Colin Wilson, who is seventy this year, is a name familiar to many as a popular writer on a bewildering variety of topics: crime and deviancy, paranormalism, archaeology and alien abduction to name just a few that have commanded his attention most recently. Older readers may remember him as the …
Matthew Coniam says that Groundhog Day explains existentialism more entertainingly than Sartre. Groundhog Day (1993) was one of the most critically acclaimed and popular American film comedies of the nineteen-nineties, admired both for its warm-hearted romance and for the delightful comic absurdity of its central premise. In this article I aim to show that it …
More than any other recent philosophical movement, the existentialists communicated their ideas through plays, novels and short stories. Peter Rickman asks: why did existentialism resort to literary expression? Jean-Paul Sartre was a professional philosopher who taught the subject and wrote substantial works on it. However he also wrote, and is widely known for, novels, short …
An introduction to our existential special issue by Anja Steinbauer. Existentialism as a philosophical movement stretches from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. Its leading figures included such giants as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre. These thinkers had very different approaches and …
Kile Jones argues that atheistic existentialism is more compelling than religious existentialism. Existentialism, as I understand it, is primarily a philosophy of tragedy. It often speaks of tragedy as bound up with existence – that you cannot have one without the other. Tragedy Before the rise of German, and in turn French, existentialism, tragedy was …