“Existentialism has long been considered an isolated philosophy whose antecedents and origins extend no farther back in time than it own creation. It has been said of existentialism that its main proponents – Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche – agreed in only one thing – namely, that they were not existentialists.The existentialist believes himself uniquely individual – an autonomous agent independent of his environment and able to arrive at his own private realization of the truth.As the movement grew and gained adherents – existentialism has been called the philosophy of the modern man – it became apparent that some basic assumptions did in fact have a grounding in earlier and more tightly structured philosophical systems – in particular, phenomenology, which, as the name implies, is the investigation of experience.In fact, phenomenology and existentialism are intrinsically related. But undergraduate and popular presentations portray them as distinctly separate movements while hinting at their relationship. Richard Zaner and Don Ihde have set out to correct this distortion in terms of carefully selected readings and enlightening introductory essays. They demonstrate just why phenomenology took the existential turn; they outline the main directions of development and then focus on the ways in which phenomenological description dominates existential writing. In their introductory essays they also seek to establish the continuity of phenomenology and existentialism with the history of Western philosophy and the ways in which Husserl drew upon Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant.”- Publisher

A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism is acomplete guide to two of the dominant movements of philosophy inthe twentieth century. Written by a team of leading scholars, including DagfinnFøllesdal, J. N. Mohanty, Robert Solomon, Jean-Luc Marion Highlights the area of overlap between the two movements Features longer essays discussing each of the main schools ofthought, shorter essays introducing prominent themes, andproblem-oriented chapters Organised topically, around concepts such as temporality,intentionality, death and nihilism Features essays on unusual subjects, such as medicine, theemotions, artificial intelligence, and environmentalphilosophy

Our world’s cultural circles are permeated by the philosophical influences of existentialism and phenomenology. Two contemporary quests to elucidate rationality – took their inspirations from Kierkegaard’s existentialism plumbing the subterranean source of subjective experience and Husserl’s phenomenology focusing on the constitutive aspect of rationality. Yet, both contrary directions mingled readily in common vindication of full reality. In the inquisitive minds (Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, et al.), a fruitful cross-pollination of insights, ideas, approaches, fused in one powerful wave disseminating throughout all domains of thought. Existentialist rejection of ratiocination and speculation together with Husserl’s shift to the genesis of rapproches philosophy and literature (Wahl, Marcel, Berdyaev, Wojtyla, Tischner, etc.), while the foundational underpinnings of language (Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc.) opened the "hidden" behind the "veils" (Sezgin and Dominguez-Rey).

The articles collected in this volume were written during a period of more than thirty years, the first having been published in 1929, the last in 1961. They are arranged in a systematic, not a chronological order, starting from a few articles mainly concerned with psychological matters and then passing on to phenomenology in the proper sense.

Reading Sartre is an indispensable resource for students of phenomenology, existentialism, ethics and aesthetics, and anyone interested in the relationship between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Specially commissioned chapters examine Sartre’s achievements, and consider his importance to contemporary philosophy.

When I began to study psychology a half century ago, it was defined as "the study of behavior and experience." By the time I completed my doctorate, shortly after the end of World War II, the last two words were fading rapidly. In one of my first graduate classes, a course in statistics, the professor announced on the first day, "Whatever exists, exists in some number." We dutifully wrote that into our notes and did not pause to recognize that thereby all that makes life meaningful was being consigned to oblivion. This bland restructuring-perhaps more accurately, destruction-of the world was typical of its time, 1940. The influence of a narrow scientistic attitude was already spreading throughout the learned disciplines. In the next two decades it would invade and tyrannize the "social sciences," education, and even philosophy. To be sure, quantification is a powerful tool, selectively employed, but too often it has been made into an executioner's axe to deny actuality to all that does not yield to its procrustean demands.

In Rethinking Existentialism, Jonathan Webber articulates an original interpretation of existentialism as the ethical theory that human freedom is the foundation of all other values. Offering an original analysis of classic literary and philosophical works published by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon up until 1952, Webber's conception of existentialism is developed in critical contrast with central works by Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Presenting his arguments in an accessible and engaging style, Webber contends that Beauvoir and Sartre initially disagreed over the structure of human freedom in 1943 but Sartre ultimately came to accept Beauvoir's view over the next decade. He develops the viewpoint that Beauvoir provides a more significant argument for authenticity than either Sartre or Fanon. He articulates in detail the existentialist theories of individual character and the social identities of gender and race, key concerns in current discourse. Webber concludes by sketching out the broader implications of his interpretation of existentialism for philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy.

Bringing to light the essential philosophical role of Marxism within Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology, this book shows that the realization of this project hinges methodologically upon a renewed conception of the proletariat qua universal class-specifically, that it rests upon a humanist myth of incarnation which, substantiated by Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'heroism', locates an objective historical purposiveness in the habituated organism of the modern subject. Foregrounding the phenomenological priority of history over corporeality in this way, Smyth's analysis recovers the 'militant' character of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology. It thus sheds critical new light on his early thought, and challenges some of the main parameters of existing scholarship by disclosing the intrinsic normativity of his basic methodological commitments.