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2024 Spring

INTRO TO EXISTENTIALISM - PHI183 Spring 2024


Course
Ivan Gutierrez
For information about registration please contact our admissions.

Introduction to existentialism, intellectual currents of the 20th century, the existentialists’ characteristic preoccupations, human freedom, religious conformity, cultural homogenization, unfeeling rationality, mass society. Analysis of philosophical texts, literary texts, films.

Here is the course outline:

1. Being Precedes Essence

I am, therefore I think

2. Anxiety

Freedom's possibility?

3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

A methodical madness?

4. The Temptations of Faith

Pinnacle of paradoxical courage or instinct of weakness?

5. The Reasonableness of Reason

The syllogism as a knife-thrust

6. The Herd

A crowd has no hands: the values of the pusillanimous

7. Bad Faith and The Look

Facticity and transcendence, in-itself and for-itself

8. No Excuses

Adam's realization before the tree

9. Living Dangerously

A happy Sisyphus

10. Inside Llewyn Davis

"If I had wings like Noah's dove..."

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