Philosophy Department

Existentialism
(PHLU 3670))

Babette Babich

Participants will explore the classic existentialism that grew out of Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel taught in Paris at the École des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939 and which found its canonic expression in Jean-Paul Sartre’s response to Husserl’s (and to Heidegger's) phenomenology during the European experience of economic confusion as well as the devastations of fascism and war. Concepts to be discussed include being, nothingness, the phenomenon of anxiety, the curse of individual freedom, desire and the body, the hell of alterity, i.e.,’other people,’ etc. We will also raise the question of contemporary manifestations of existentialism.