pdf version of the entry Existentialism https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/existentialism/ from the Summer 2023 Edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Co-Principal Editors: Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman Associate Editors: Colin Allen, Hannah Kim, & Paul Oppenheimer Faculty Sponsors: R. Lanier Anderson & Thomas Icard Editorial Board: https://plato.stanford.edu/board.html Library of Congress ISSN: 1095-5054 Notice: This PDF version was distributed by request to mem- bers of the Friends of the SEP Society and by courtesy to SEP content contributors. It is solely for their fair use. Unauthorized distribution is prohibited. To learn how to join the Friends of the SEP Society and obtain authorized PDF versions of SEP entries, please visit https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/ . Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Copyright © 2023 by the publisher The Metaphysics Research Lab Department of Philosophy Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 Existentialism Copyright © 2023 by the author Kevin Aho All rights reserved. Copyright policy: https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/info/copyright/ Existentialism First published Fri Jan 6, 2023 As an intellectual movement that exploded on the scene in mid-twentieth- century France, “existentialism” is often viewed as a historically situated event that emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness. Although the most popular voices of this movement were French, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as compatriots such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the conceptual groundwork of the movement was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century by pioneers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century German philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers as well as prominent Spanish intellectuals José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. The core ideas have also been illuminated in key literary works. Beyond the plays, short stories, and novels by French luminaries like Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there were Parisian writers such as Jean Genet and André Gide, the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the work of Norwegian authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, and the German-language iconoclasts Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. The movement even found expression across the pond in the work of the “lost generation” of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, mid-century “beat” authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs, and the self- proclaimed “American existentialist,” Norman Mailer (Cotkin 2003, 185). 1