This 16-week course is designed to introduce learners to a number of the key topics, texts, and thinkers in the movement of 19th and 20th century Existentialism. The focus for this class is on Existentialist philosophy and literature, but Existentialism also had a significant impact in theology, psychology, film, and the fine arts as well. When we look at the canon of Existentialist thinkers and texts, it is clear that these disciplinary and subject-matter boundaries were not scrupulously respected by those who wrote them, or those who appreciated, discussed, and even taught them. From the very beginning, Philosophy and literature, for one, are deeply interconnected in the body of Existentialist work.

Existentialism is about life, concrete experience, freedom and agency, and the individual. By adopting literary perspectives and using literary genres (for instance the novel) these themes can be made central, illustrated, worked out, explored, developed within the narrative of a particular person or set of people. Whereas there is a tendency to all philosophy to slip towards the universally applicable, the impersonal, the objective, even when a given character is supposed to be a generic "Everyman," a stand-in for anyone whosoever, that person still exists in and experiences the particular situations depicted within the narrative. They face particular choices and problems, into which we, and often they, can read more general human conditions, and we are able to concentrate upon those as determinate, as singular.

Many of the key themes explored as central to the human condition in Existentialism receive complementary treatments in Philosophy and in Literature. We can, for example, understand the anguish which the self-determining choices we always have to make in determinate situations, without being able to displace that choice off to some source of certainty, both through a philosophical analysis and presentation of that condition, and through observing, perhaps even empathizing or identifying with a character in a short story or novel. 

Over the 16 weeks of this online class, we will be engaging in study together of a broadly representative set of fourteen thinkers specifically selected for the itinerary we will be following. Their works should be challenging, and remain so even for those who have read them multiple times. We will have discussions that are aimed at deepening your understanding and working through confusions or puzzles that often arise from the Existentialist works we will explore.

Some of the key recurring themes we will be examining include:

• Thinking From Concrete Situations:
• Subjectivity, Individuality, and Interiority:
• The Mind's Relationship to the Body: 
• The Importance of Affectivity
• Freedom, Responsibility, and Possibilities:
• Living an Authentic Existence:
• Time and Temporality
• Absurdity, Paradox, or Mystery:
• Death, Nothingness, and Negation
• The Crowd, The Public, and Mass Media: 
• Criticism of The System, Universality, Necessity
• Responsibility Towards Other Persons
• Gender, Love, and Sexuality:
• Transcendence, The Divine, and Religion: