Existentialist Themes

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this class, we will consider existentialism as a European phenomenon that for our purposes begins in the early and mid-nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and continues in the works of several German and French thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Simone Weil. We will consider some of the principal themes of existentialism - the primacy of authenticity, the pervasiveness of "dread" or Angst, the inescapability of the absurd - and explore them through a number of representative works of philosophy, literature and film.