Ingo Farin

Humanities Building 363

Office Hours: Monday 12:00-1:30
Email: Ingo.Farin@utas.edu.au
Tel.: 6227508
Textbook available at Uniprint (required)
Camus (Co-op Bookstore)
The Myth of Sisyphus (required)
The Stranger (optional)

Please read the unit-outline on MyLO or if you
are a distance student read the unit-outline for
distance students as sent out by the Distance
Education Office.
Note: The only prerequisites are 25% Arts
Units.
The only mutual exclusion that applies is my
old existentialism unit. If you have taken
Postmodern Thought or any of my history
units, you can enrol for the unit.

One Essay (3000/3500 words)
One Final Exam (Questions released in week 13)
Voluntary Presentations (10 minutes)

Please wait for an announcement on Friday which
tutorial slots we will use. (I doubt that we will
use all three slots.)
The tutorials will be weekly (from week 2).
Please read: Existentialism is a Humanism by
Sartre.

Camus
Kierkegaard
Nietzsche
Heidegger
Sartre

Do you know other Existentialist Authors?
Kierkegaard
Religious Existentialism [Barth, Bultmann,
Buber, Rosenzweig]
Nietzsche
A-theistic or non-theistic Existentialism
[Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre]
Jaspers
Heidegger
Marcel
Sartre
de Beauvoir
Camus
Shestov
Berdyaev
Unamuno
Ortega y Gasset
With the exception of Sartre and possibly
Camus no existentialist philosopher has ever
endorsed such a thing as existentialism. Most
existentialists have vehemently opposed to be
grouped together with existentialists.

Sometimes artists and writers are also put in
the existentialist camp.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Rilke, Hesse,
Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir.
The 1940s and 1950s in Paris!

It was so successful that MANY today are still
existentialists whether they know it or not.

The philosophical roots of existentialism go back to
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers, and Heidegger.

Existentialist thought is NOT history! For instance, in
the 1980s Foucault would turn to existentialist
themes.
Human beings are prone to experience estrangement
from the world in which they live []. While human
beings are embodied occupants of the world, their
powers of reflection, self-interpretation, evaluation,
and choice distinguish them from all other occupants
of the world from animals, plants, and mere things.
It would be wrong, though, to infer from this
distinction that there is no intimate relationship
between human beings and the world. Indeed,
philosophical reflection on human existence and the
world reveals that neither is thinkable in the absence
of the other.
A main reason for this is that the world of things cannot
be understood except by reference to the significance
that these things have in relation to human purposes
and practices. Once this intimacy is appreciated
and once the sense of estrangement is properly
construed it emerges that each human being is
possessed of a radical freedom and responsibility,
not only to choose and to act, but to interpret and
evaluate the world. Honest recognition by people of
the disturbing degree of freedom that they possess
requires cultivating a moral comportment or stance
towards themselves and others that honours the
reciprocal interdependence of individual lives.
is anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist; anti-
Cartesian, opposed to rationalism.
if Descartes puts a premium on the cogito, ergo sum
[I think, therefore I am], existentialists tend to inquire
into the sum, the I am. What am I? An existing
something. Voil: Existence! (Finitude, Facticity &
Transcendence, Responsibility!)
favours, like Descartes, the first-person perspective
over the third-person perspective, but not in the
service of gaining objective knowledge.
favours ontology over epistemology on the grounds
that existence (the existing thinker) precedes essence
and knowledge.

What is Continental Philosophy?
An umbrella term for everything that is not
analytic philosophy!
What is Existentialism?
An umbrella term for a specific form of
Continental Philosophy

For the last 50 to 70 years academic philosophy (as
taught in universities in the West) has been deeply
divided between Analytic and Continental
Philosophers.
Although often downplayed and officially
ignored, it is still a very significant political
marker within academic philosophy that comes
into play whenever new positions in philosophy
departments are advertised.


emphasizes and utilizes logic and logical analysis
of statements [propositions];
pays critical respect to the success of modern
scientific research methods and the concomitant
research ethos;
is committed to the European Enlightenment
Project, as originally articulated by Locke, Hume,
Kant, and applied by such giants of science such as
Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and their recent
successors;
is sometimes quite hostile to history and historical
analyses;
is connected with these names: Frege, Wittgenstein
(I), Russell, Ayer, Popper, Carnap, Quine, Lewis.
is critical of instrumental reason, and scientism, and
the supposition of some neutral objectivity;
is critical of the alienation that follows from a sharp
subject-object opposition;
emphasizes the human interests hat shape or
constitute our understanding of the world;
emphasizes the temporality, historicity, finitude &
uniqueness of each human life (death, the absurd,
call of conscience)
is connected with names such as Husserl, Scheler,
Dilthey, Heidegger, Sartre, de-Beauvoir, Merleau-
Ponty, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida.
Phenomenology: Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty.
Existentialism : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers,
Wahl, Heidegger, Sartre.
Hermeneutics: Dilthey, Heidegger, Ricoeur,
Vattimo.
Deconstruction: Derrida, Levinas, Foucault,
Rorty, Caputo, Vattimo.