Abstract:

If existentialism be understood in a very broad sense as a philosophy which emphasizes some of such well-known common themes as human freedom, death and anxiety taken place in modern existentialist philosophies, then there will be strong justification for the view that many philosophers from Socrates to Kant are existentalists. But the term “existentialist” does not connote only some common themes. It also needs that those themes should have been considered in terms of some common existentialist principles. For that reason, this paper primarily tries to establish these common principles or properties held by modern existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Marcel, Merlau Ponty, Sartre and Heidegger. The paper claims that there are at least five common properties shared by these philosophers and that they can be used in deciding whether any philosophy be counted as an existentialist: (1) centrality of man; (2) considering man as a particular, concrete entity, namely an individual; (3) priority of existence over esence; (4) subjectivity of truth; (5) philosophizing from the standpoint of an actor. Yet, all these principles or properties, should not be considered equally applicable to every philosophers mentioned. In addition to this general outline, the paper indicates on one hand that the principle of subjectivity in existentialism is not identical to subjectivism in the sense of arbitrariness, and on the other that the meaning of Sartre’s claim ‘existence precedes esence’ is not the same for all existentialists.

Keywords: