ABSTRACT
Existential philosophy is commonly associated with ‘existentialism’ and understood as a both cultural and philosophical movement in Europe in the 1930s to 1950s. Sartre (2007) was the first to label his philosophy with the term ‘existentialism’ but he is far from the only philosopher who has been occupied with matters of existence or, more precisely, what it means to exist as a human being. This has been the concern of many philosophers at least since the Ancient Greek philosophers. Furthermore, some philosophers who are commonly associated with ‘existentialism’, such as Heidegger, Marcel and Camus, explicitly repudiated the label. In this essay, I therefore attempt to clarify an understanding of existential philosophy that is not restricted to the particular understanding outlined and labelled by Sartre. To describe existential philosophy as an ‘-ism’ can easily denote a certain view and particular (i. e. Sartrean) construal of human existence (Schacht 2012). But existential philosophy is not a school of thought with an agreed project and programme (like, for example, the logical positivism of the Vienna circle or the critical theory of the Frankfurt school). Moreover, it could be argued that existential philosophy is not a philosophical branch of its own but rather a subcategory to especially existential phenomenology, theology and existential psychology. This would be hard to deny since most, perhaps all, existential philosophers either declared themselves to belong to one of these traditions or have informed subsequent studies within these fields. In that sense, it would be more appropriate to consider existential philosophers as a family or perhaps a philosophical movement (Cooper 2012). Existential philosophy thus understood describes a number of philosophers with a shared interest in human existence.
