文档介绍：PHILOSOPHY • HISTORY HISTORICAL
DICTIONARY
MICHELMAN
Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, No. 82 OF
Existentialism is the philosophy of human existence and flourished first in Germany
in the 1920s and 1930s, then in France in the decade following the end of World EXISTENTIALISM
War II. The operative meaning of existentialism is thus broader than it was circa 1945,
when the term first gained currency in France as a label for the philosophy of Jean-
Paul Sartre. However, it is considerably less broad than the view proposed - DICTIONARY
HISTORICAL
mentators in the 1950s and 1960s, who, in an effort to e Sartre’s hegemony,
discovered the seeds of existentialism far and wide: in Shakespeare, Saint Augustine,
and the Old Testament prophets. In this dictionary, existentialism is a decidedly 20th-
century phenomenon with roots in the 19th century. The philosophy of existential-
OF
ism should be understood as all philosophies are—as part of an ongoing intellectual
tradition, an evolving history of problems, concepts, and arguments. EXISTENTIALISM
Historical Dictionary of Existentialism explains the central claims of existentialist
philosophy and the contexts in which it developed into one of the most influential
intellectual trends of the 20th century. This is done through a chronology, introduc-
tory essay, bibliography, and more than 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries offer-
ing clear, accessible accounts of the life and thought of major existentialists like Jean-
Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de
Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as thinkers influential
to its development, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and
Max Scheler. Stephen Michelman provides an integrated, critical, and historically
sensitive understanding of this important philosophical movement.
STEPHEN MICHELMAN