Wednesday:

Please re-read: Existentialism is a

Humanism by Sartre.
Friday:
Kierkegaard, Diary Entry

Tutorial 1
Wednesday 11:00 @ HUM 371/Video-Link

Tutorial 2
Tuesday 1:00 @ Law 121

You can enrol for the tutorials on MyLO. The
space in HUM 371 is limited. So, we need lots
of people come to Law 121.
Sartre claims that in choosing myself, I choose
for mankind. [See p. 396/97; 410, 413]
Explain
Sartre aligns morality and art. [p. 410/411]
Explain
Sartre claims that the cult of humanity ends in
Fascism. [p.415]
Explain.


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.

Phenomenology: Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty.
Hermeneutics: Dilthey, Heidegger, Ricoeur,
Vattimo.
Deconstruction: Derrida, Levinas, Foucault,
Rorty, Caputo, Vattimo.
Existentialism : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers,
Wahl, Heidegger, Sartre.

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.
Being and Nothingness (1943)
Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)
The Words (1964)
Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 1964
Perhaps one of the best known public
intellectuals in the 20
th
century. Over one
million people milled around in the streets of
Paris at his funeral.


Existence
Precedes
Essence
Existence = That something is = Thatness
Essence = What something is = Whatness

Existence and Essence are quite different. I can define
the essence of anything (say, a unicorn) without
assuming that unicorns exist in reality.

Traditionally, many philosophers thought that there
is only one thing whose essence necessarily implies
its existence. God!
A claim primarily about human beings
There is no a priori definition of human being.
Humans are what they make of themselves.
Humans are not created by a God according to a
plan or blueprint. There is no essence or fixed
conception of humanity.
First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on
the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.
If man, as the existentialist conceives of him, is
indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing.
(35/36)
Nothing =
no/thing =
no definite object.
Man or Woman = subject = freedom = self-
determination through the projects that s/he lives.
Man or Woman never coalesces with any definite
characterization, because s/he is something that only
exists in the project of living forwards.
Ultimately, Sartre claims that consciousness is No-
thing. That is why he calls his book Being and
Nothingness.
According to Sartre:
Man & Woman exist. Period. That is called our
Facticty.
But this is a facticity without an essence. We are what
we make of ourselves. (Freedom! ) We always are
more than what we are. We are our projects. We
transcend the given situation. That is called
Transcendence.
Facticity & Transcendence describe the human
reality. These are formal characterizations that do not
say what man or woman is in material terms.