PHILOSOP2557 - Existentialism

Was first given as a public lecture Oct 28, 1945, just after end of WWII Sartre makes 4 main arguments 1. Humans were not created to serve a preexisting purpose 2. To a great extent, people are self-creating 3. Individual consciousness is not causally determined to construct a particular identity of particular ends.  4. Values are subjective. Something is valuable because I choose to value it Purpose of the lecture was to defend existentialism Existentialism was accused of inciting people to dwe

Dualism or Binaries- one term that’s set up in relation to another term.  Interiority/exteriority One/other Mind/body For-itself/In-itself  No absolute exclusion, we can live both lives, due to temporality. Understand their ambiguity We Begin as Children The Serious World of ready-made values and established authorities We are creators of the meaning and value Metaphysically privileged existence  Enslavement and Complicity For Beauvoir, those enslaved may be forced into a serious world of imp

Part I Willing my own freedom depends upon the freedom of others. We need others to be free because their own freedom aims towards opening a future we need others to assist in opening it up for us.  We are thrown into a world that others have already established, and only the freedom of others that allows them to establish the world keeps each of us from hardening into the absurdity of facticity. We need others to be free in order to recognize the significance of the world that we are disclosing

WESEN: as a noun, it would mean essence. As a verb, it would be essence and as a way of being. Essence is a way of being that is historical. It is in time and in place One essence that belongs to being human across time and history, is that humans are thinking beings.  The humans being in time are the ones who question their own being.  How someone “is”: that’s being.  We’ve forgotten about being and forgotten about asking the question of being in this age, instead we calculate and strive for e

Da-Sein means “being there” or “being here” In Being there, design is essentially primordially from the beginning that is always already a spatial being There is no division of for itself (the consciousness) and in itself (the body) since consciousness is arelady embodied in a world, and it can only be in a world The problem of the cartesian subject is that its a subject that only encounters the world it represents to itself (you can’t be sure that the world is actually real) It only encounters