PHIL246

035974

Suppose it was entirely up to you to decide what is right or wrong, what is valuable and what is not. Suppose it was \"entirely\" up to you in the sense that there were no other standards or guidelines to tell you how to go about making these decisions. That would be a huge and perhaps scary task. Is it even possible to make decisions in a world where there are no objective norms and values to fall back on? A group of philosophers, the existentialists, thought that our actual task in this world is not so different. On their account, at least when it comes to what is most valuable and the fundamental norms of one's own life, it is entirely up to each one of us to make that decision for ourselves. This course is an introduction to various theories and expressions of 19th- and 20th-century existentialism and its phenomenological method. We will read authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Fanon. We will also analyze some existentialist literature.

GRD - Regular Grades A, B, C, D, E

Undergraduate

GE - T2-INDV (Tier 2 Individuals & Societies), GEED - EPHUM (Gen Ed: EP Humanist)