Historical Dictionary of Existentialism
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loginThe subject of this dictionary is the philosophy of human existence thatflourished first in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and then in Francein the decade following the end of World War II. The operative mean-ing of existentialism here is thus broader than it was around 1945, whenthe term first gained currency in France as a label for the philosophy ofJean-Paul Sartre. However, it is considerably less broad than the viewproposed by commentators in the 1950s and 1960s who, in an attemptto overcome Sartre’s hegemony, discovered the seeds of existentialismfar and wide—in Shakespeare, Saint Augustine, and the Old Testamentprophets. In this dictionary, existentialism is understood as a decidedly20th-century phenomenon, though with roots in the 19th century. Efforthas been made to understand the philosophy of existentialism, as allphilosophies should be understood, as part of an ongoing intellectualtradition: an evolving history of problems, concepts, and arguments. Totake one salient example, existentialism would not have been possiblewithout a prior philosophical endeavor formulated by EdmundHusserl in the early 1900s called phenomenology.Without Husserl’sphenomenology, the philosophy of existence would have taken a radi-cally different form. Its major theoretical statements, Martin Heideg-ger’s Being and Timeand Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,would perhaps never have been written.
