PHIL 2710

The existentialists focus on what is individual and unique about human lives. They emphasize the sense in which we choose projects and lives and even deaths for ourselves and find self-deception in our ways of avoiding choices. Some existentialists argue that whatever meaning our lives have must be invented. Some contend that life is absurd. This course is an introduction to the themes of existentialism through the study of the philosophy and fiction of Dostoevsky, Ortega y Gasset, Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.