Existentialism entered the public consciousness after the Second World War, especially through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Indeed, these charismatic and engaged thinkers gave philosophy a level of glamour it had not before enjoyed, while existentialism’s forefathers—including Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard—were soon rediscovered and embraced anew. Moreover, in addition to the initial connection between existentialism and literature, the movement developed many interdisciplinary approaches: feminist existentialism, religious existentialism, and political existentialism, to name just a few. As a broad philosophical doctrine, as well as in its interdisciplinary combinations, existentialism is of lasting significance, and remains a thriving enterprise.
To make sense of existentialism’s huge—and growing—corpus of scholarly literature, this new Routledge collection answers the need for an authoritative, up-to-date, and comprehensive reference work. In four volumes, it assembles the foundational and the very best cutting-edge research.
Volume I (‘Key Figures and Definitions’) maps the development of existentialism from the first existentialist to the classic and contemporary existentialists. It also gives users an impression of the most prominent definitions of existentialism. Volume II (‘Basic Themes and Concepts’), meanwhile, collects the most important texts on the key notions of existentialism, such as subject/object, authenticity, ambiguity, humanism, and emotions. Volume III (‘Existentialist Aesthetics and Psychology’) attends to those areas outside philosophy which have been most influenced by existentialism: aesthetics (literature, theatre, art, theory) and psychology (psychoanalysis, psychotherapy). The final volume in the collection (‘Horizons of Existentialism’) considers several other interdisciplinary areas, including: religion, feminism, communications, and politics.
Existentialism is supplemented with a full index, and includes a newly written comprehensive introduction which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. The collection will be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital research resource.
Volume I: Key Figures and Definitions
Part 1: Definitions, Introductions, Overviews
1. Steve Crowell, ‘Existentialism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009), pp. 1–55.
2. William Barrett, ‘The Advent of Existentialism’, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 3–19.
3. Mikel Dufrenne, ‘Existentialism and Existententialism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1965, 26, 1, 51–62.
4. Jack Reynolds, ‘Existentialism’, in S. Luft and S. Overgaard, The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 485–95.
Part 2: The First Existentialists
5. Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Task of Becoming Subjective’, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 115–67.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Fragments 1–8, 124, 125, 341, 342) (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 73–83, 180–2, 273–5.
Part 3: Some Classic Existentialists
7. Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Existential Philosophy?’ and ‘French Existentialism’, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), pp. 163–93.
8. Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, Basic Writings (Harper Collins, 1977), pp. 93–110.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Look’, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp. 340–58.
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Battle Over Existentialism’, Sense and Nonsense [1945] (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 71–82.
11. Karl Jaspers, ‘The Encompassing’, Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures (London: Routledge, 1956), pp. 51–76.
12. Albert Camus, ‘An Absurd Reasoning’, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 11–35.
13. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Ambiguity and Freedom’, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), pp. 1–34.
Part 4: Some Contemporary Existentialists
14. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Relationship with Existence’ and ‘Existence without Existents’, Existence and Existents (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 21–8, 57–64.
15. Judith Butler, ‘Scenes of Address’ and ‘Responsibility: The Primacy of the Other’, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 9–20, 83–101.
16. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 1–32.
17. Renaud Barbaras, ‘Desire as the Essence of Subjectivity’, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 108–122.
Volume II: Basic Themes and Concepts
Part 5: Subjectivity
18. David Carr, ‘Transcendental and Empirical Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition’, in D. Welton (ed.), The New Husserl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 181–99.
19. Rudolf Bernet, ‘The Other in Myself’, in S. Critchley and P. Dews (eds.), Deconstructive Subjectivities (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 169–84.
20. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘L’Interloqué’, Who Comes After the Subject? (eds. Eduardo Cadava et al.) (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 236–45.
21. Michel Foucault, ‘The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Course Summary’, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 491–505.
Part 6: Humanism
22. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Is Existentialism a Humanism?’, Existentialism is a Humanism (London: Random House, 1997), pp. 23–56.
23. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Basic Writings (Harper Collins, 1977), pp. 215–65.
24. Charles Taylor, ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 45–76.
25. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 111–36.
26. Timothy Mooney, ‘On Naturalist and Humanist Motivations in Deconstructive Reading’.
Part 7: Moods and Senses
27. Robert C. Solomon, ‘Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (London: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 291–307.
28. Martin Heidegger, (a) ‘Selected Texts on Fear, Anxiety, Boredom, and Fundamental Moods’, Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 126–34, 172–8; (b) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 153–67; (c) Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 3–5, 9–17.
29. Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Passion of Facticity’, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 211–29.
30. Georges Bataille, ‘Love’, in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds.), The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 94–7.
31. Edward S. Casey, ‘The World of Nostalgia’, Man and World, 1987, 20, 361–84.
32. Hilge Landweer, ‘The Sense of Appropriateness’ (2011).
Part 8: Crisis and History
33. Ortega y Gasset, ‘History as a System’, History as a System and Other Essays (New York: Norton, 1941), pp. 174–207, 216–19, 223–33.
34. Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’ (‘The Vienna Lecture’), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 269–99.
35. Marvin Farber, ‘Existence and the Life-World’, Phenomenology and Existence (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 122–38.
36. Jacques Derrida, ‘The "World" of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty)’, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 117–59.
Volume III: Existentialist Aesthetics and Philosophy of Religion
Part 9: Existentialism and Literature
37. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘What is Writing?’, What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 1–25.
38. Christina Howells, ‘Sartre and the Commitment of Pure Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 1978, 18, 2, 172–82.
39. M. M. Bhaktin, ‘Discourse in Dostoevsky’, in F. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground: With Background and Sources (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 146–55.
40. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Inspiration’, The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 163–87.
41. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘What is a Minor Literature?’, Mississippi Review, 1983, 11, 3, 13–33.
Part 10: Existentialism and Art
42. Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, Man and World, 1973, 6, 1, 3–8.
43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in G. A. Johnson (ed.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 59–75.
44. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Painting and Sensation’, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 25–31.
45. Wayne Martin, ‘Bubbles and Skulls: The Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness in Dutch Still-Life Painting’, in Wrathall and Dreyfus (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 559–83.
46. Mikel Dufrenne ‘The Imaginary’, In the Presence of the Sensuous (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987), pp. 39–68.
47. Eero Tarasti, ‘Signs as Acts and Events: On Musical Situations’, Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 65–87.
48. Alexander Kozin, ‘The Appearing Memory: Gilles Deleuze and Andrey Tarkovsky on "Crystal-Image"’, Memory Studies, 2009, 2, 103–16.
49. Tanja Staehler, ‘"Everywhere and Nowhere": Exploring Ambiguity with Phenomenology and Dance’, Chiasmi International, 2010, 12, 217–40.
Part 11: Existentialism and Religion
50. Gabriel Marcel, ‘Testimony and Existentialism’, Philosophy of Existence (New York: Citadel Press, 1987), pp. 67–76.
51. Martin Buber, ‘Dialogue. Section 1: Description’, Between Man and Man (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–21.
52. Nicolas Berdyaev, ‘Manhood’, The Human and the Divine (Semantron Press, 2009).
53. Paul Tillich, ‘Existential Analyses and Religious Symbols’, in W. Herberg (ed.), Four Existentialist Theologians A Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958), pp. 277–91.
54. Simone Weil, ‘Human Personality’, Selected Essays, 1934–1943 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 9–34.
55. Klaus Held, ‘World, Emptiness, Nothingness: A Phenomenological Approach to the Religious Tradition of Japan’, Human Studies, 1997, 20, 153–67.
56. Felix O’Murchadha, ‘Religion and Ethics’, in L. Lawlor (ed.), The History of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 4 (‘Responses to Phenomenology, 1930–1960’) (Chesham, Acumen, 2010), pp. 195–216.
57. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Angels’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2001, 16, 3, 117–23.
Volume IV: Horizons of Existentialism
Part 12: Existential Psychology
58. Tran-Duc Thao, ‘The Indicative Gesture’, Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness (Boston: Kluwer Publishing, 1984), pp. 3–29.
59. Ludwig Binswanger, ‘The Existential Analysis School of Thought’, in R. May, E. Angel, and H. Ellenberger (eds.), Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Touchstone, 1958), pp. 191–213.
60. Rollo May, ‘Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy: Some Implications for Psychotherapeutic Technique’, in R. May, E. Angel, and H. Ellenberger (eds.), Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Touchstone, 1958), pp. 76–91.
61. Erwin Straus, ‘Man: A Questioning Being’, Phenomenological Psychology (London: Tavistock, 1966), pp. 166–87.
62. Eugene T. Gendlin, ‘Experiential Explication and Truth’, Journal of Existentialism, 1995, 6, 131–46.
63. Fred Dallmayr, ‘Heidegger and Freud’, Political Psychology, 1993, 14, 2, 235–53.
Part 13: Existentialism and Feminism
64. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 2011), pp. 38–49, 769–82.
65. Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies, 1986, 72, 35–49.
66. Iris Marion Young, ‘Lived Body Versus Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity’, Ratio, 2002, XV, 410–28.
67. Luce Irigaray, ‘Love Between Us’, in Eduardo Cadava et al. (eds.), Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 167–77.
68. Alia Al-Saji, ‘Bodies and Sensings: On the Uses of Husserlian Phenomenology for Feminist Theory’, Continental Philosophy Review, 2010, 42, 13–37.
69. Alison Stone, ‘Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy’, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2004, 1, 2, 135–53.
Part 14: Culture and Politics
70. Thomas Flynn, ‘Political Existentialism: The Career of Sartre’s Political Thought’, in S. Crowell (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 227–51.
71. Anne O’Byrne, ‘Symbol, Exchange, and Birth: Towards a Theory of Labour and Relation’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2004, 30, 3, 355–73.
72. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Can Race Be Thought in Terms of Facticity? A Reconsideration of Sartre’s and Fanon’s Existential Theories of Race’, in S. Nelson and F. Raffoul (eds.), Rethinking Facticity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), pp. 195–204.
73. John Wild ‘Marxist Humanism and Existential Philosophy’, Continental Philosophy Review, 2011, 44, 329–39.
74. Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘Between Cultures’, Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), pp. 70–84.
75. Michael Naas, ‘One Nation … Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God’, Research in Phenomenology, 2006, 36, 15–44.
