“French existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir pointed to authenticity as a foundational element of the meaning of life. But she meant something very different by the idea than the familiar parade of platitudes about being true to a pure form of yourself. For Beauvoir, there is no fixed essence to our being, since we are always becoming something other than what we are today. For Beauvoir, “existence precedes essence,” meaning that we exist first and then spend the rest of our lives creating who we are (our essence). 1 She thought that there is no “true self” to discover, but only a vibrant self that we create through our choices. In other words, we are creative nothings.” — How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment by Skye C. Cleary
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Monday, June 29, 2026
authentic selfhood emerges in communication
Same message my wife and I took away from Toy Story 5 yesterday (having seen the original a few dozen times when our girls were small, we thought we should see the new one at least once): “Jaspers argued that we can’t be human all by ourselves and authentic selfhood emerges in communication. Too much alone time and we slide into a dreary abyss. Authentic communication is what Jaspers called a “loving contest”. It’s risky because it involves putting down our weapons of self-protection and performative exchanges. It involves curiosity and questioning and being open to other people’s thinking.” https://open.substack.com/pub/skyecleary/p/bewitched?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
The Radical Act of Enjoying This Life
Be happy like a dachshund: Gary Shteyngart
A Sisyphean labor
Saturday, June 20, 2026
Who Wants to Live Forever? | Issue 174 | Philosophy Now
…Martin Heidegger argued in Being and Time (1927) that human beings are not simply creatures who happen to die. Rather, we are creatures for whom the awareness of death is constitutive of who we are. He called this condition ‘being-toward-death’. On Heidegger’s reckoning, the recognition that our existence is finite is not merely background noise, but the very condition that makes our choices matter. To commit to a career, a relationship, or a cause, is to accept a path that only makes sense against the approach of an ending. Consider what we most genuinely admire in peoples’ lives: the parent who sacrifices their own ambitions for their children; the artist who spends a lifetime perfecting a craft they know they will never fully master; the activist who works hard for a cause they will not live to see completed. None of this carries the same moral weight for a being with unlimited time available. An immortal can always afford to wait, to hedge his bets and keep his options open, and in doing so may find that his choices gradually lose the very weight that makes them categorical.
The transhumanists promise us more time. Heidegger suggests that it is precisely the limit on our time that makes it worth anything.
Endless Conclusions
Perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about the desire to live forever is that it’s a displacement – a confusion of one desire for another. When most of us say we want immortality, what we actually mean is that we want more time for what matters to us. More time with the people we love, more time to pursue what gives life meaning, more time to see how things turn out. That is not a desire for endless duration, it’s a desire for more depth.
Williams is right that an immortal life risks losing precisely the depth and quality that makes life worth living. Heidegger adds a sharper point still: it is not merely that immortality might produce boredom, but that a life without death is structured differently from ours in ways that may make urgency, commitment, and genuine love increasingly difficult to sustain. When every choice is revisable and no horizon is final, choices lose the weight that makes them meaningful.
The transhumanists may yet prove Williams wrong about boredom. But whether a technologically extended life would still be a genuinely human life, or in engineering away our limitations we also engineer away something essential to humanity, remains an open yet urgent question.
The ethicist Michael Sandel reminds us that there is a form of wisdom in receiving life as it’s given rather than endlessly remaking it on our own terms. I cannot help but wonder whether that’s an ominous warning to those who would seek to augment human beings exponentially. Such a project risks two things. First, to borrow some words from Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Second, as mentioned, at what point would a sufficiently augmented human being cease to be human in any sense we would recognise?
…
https://philosophynow.org/issues/174/Who_Wants_to_Live_ForeverFriday, June 19, 2026
What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.
The French were grappling with two questions this week.
Not whether President Trump would hurl insults and leave the Group of 7 early or who the least-known player in the World Cup is.
Instead, they were asking: Can one be happy when others are not? And, Do we have control of our words?
The questions were part of this year’s written test in philosophy, taken at the exact same time each year around the country by more than a half-million 17- and 18-year-olds. The students, who have spent all year taking a required course in philosophy, have to answer one of two questions, or dissect a philosophical tract. This year, the tract came from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 book, “Human, All Too Human.”
Students have four hours to write their responses. The exam is such an important part of French education that local news outlets commit live-blogs to it, beside their rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to discuss their own responses to the questions on the radio and television and in newspapers...
existentialist “manifesto”
“In what are commonly regarded as classics of existentialism–Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception–but also in works by Jaspers, Marcel, Beauvoir, Martin Buber, and José Ortega y Gasset, there is affinity on each of the following issues:
The human predicament that inspires the very enterprise of philosophy; the distinctive character of human existence that distinguishes it from all other types of existence; the intimacy of the relationship between human beings and their world; the radical character of individual human freedom; the tone that a life led in appreciation of this freedom must possess; and the structure of interpersonal relations consonant with this radical, existential freedom.
Affinity with respect to these issues allows, to be sure, for interesting differences among existentialist thinkers. Nevertheless, the affinity is substantial. Each of the writers mentioned in the preceding paragraph would, at some time in their careers, have endorsed the following general statement, a sort of existentialist “manifesto”: Human beings are prone to experience estrangement from the world in which they live, and it is this sense of estrangement which has long inspired philosophical attempts to locate human existence in relation to the order of things. A sense of estrangement is rooted in the fact that, while human beings are embodied occupants of the world, their powers of reflection, self-interpretation, evaluation, and choice distinguish them from all other occupants of the world–from animals, plants, and mere things. It would be wrong, though, to infer from this distinction that there is no intimate relationship between human beings and the world. Indeed, philosophical reflection on human existence and the world reveals that neither is thinkable in the absence of the other. A main reason for this is that the world of things cannot be understood except by reference to the significance that these things have in relation to human purposes and practices. Once this intimacy is appreciated–and once the sense of estrangement is properly construed–it emerges that each human being is possessed of a radical freedom and responsibility, not only to choose and to act, but to interpret and evaluate the world. Honest recognition by people of the disturbing degree of freedom that they possess requires cultivating a moral comportment or stance towards themselves and others that honours the reciprocal interdependence of individual lives.” — The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Steven Crowell
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Anti-antinatalism
“… raises serious ethical concerns about suffering and the responsibilities of parenthood. These are not trivial questions. But the antinatalist position, as often expressed, collapses under its own absolutism. It demands a kind of perfection – a life without pain – but rejects or ignores the very pleasures that might make life worthwhile even in the midst of pain. It dismisses joy as a false positive, efforts to induce pleasure as chemically mediated, and meaning as contingent. But in doing so, it reveals a deeper discomfort, with the very texture of life: its ambivalence, its contradictions, and its refusal to be all good or all bad. A more robust (and honest) philosophy of life would accept this ambivalence, not flee from it. It would recognize that joy can emerge unbidden, that love is sometimes worth the grief it entails, and that the richness of existence lies in its imperfection. To live is to risk, yes – but it is also to discover, to connect, to create, and to care. From the Buddhist perspective, suffering arises not from existence itself, but from our untrained minds’ attachments, and the Buddhist path to liberation is not rejection of life, but its transformation through mindfulness and compassion. Similarly, Erich Fromm reminds us that isolated existence is unbearable because we are sentient social beings. For such beings it is the experience of connection – a profound oneness with others – that makes life meaningful and beautiful. So perhaps antinatalists are so because they’re caught in a form of existential isolation, mistaking their painful state for the totality of life’s meaning. Yet it is precisely through forging connection that life’s ambivalence may become bearable, even worthwhile. And perhaps that, in itself, is enough justification to continue.” © DENIZ KOSE 2026 Philosophy Now
An extended tradition
“Reflecting on the classics of existentialism from the vantage point of contemporary thought reveals new dimensions in them, which in turn may suggest further perspectives on contemporary problems. By developing existential themes in dialogue with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and John McDowell, for instance, Haugeland is able to read Heidegger in a way that reveals more to this thinker’s project than he himself might have imagined–or appreciated. The legacy of existentialism is not always identical to the legacy that the canonical authors may have imagined for themselves–a point that they, in turn, often exploited in their own dealings with their historical predecessors. Indeed, the very idea that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche–or Pascal or Augustine or Montaigne or even Socrates–belong to an extended tradition of “existentialism” is something of an artifact of how these figures were interpreted by Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, and other canonical existentialists. Whatever suspicions this might engender from a purely historical point of view, it is unobjectionable as philosophy–especially existential philosophy, with its insistence that thinking is always a free, creative response to its own history.” — The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Steven Crowell
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
An extended tradition
“Reflecting on the classics of existentialism from the vantage point of contemporary thought reveals new dimensions in them, which in turn may suggest further perspectives on contemporary problems. By developing existential themes in dialogue with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and John McDowell, for instance, Haugeland is able to read Heidegger in a way that reveals more to this thinker’s project than he himself might have imagined–or appreciated. The legacy of existentialism is not always identical to the legacy that the canonical authors may have imagined for themselves–a point that they, in turn, often exploited in their own dealings with their historical predecessors. Indeed, the very idea that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche–or Pascal or Augustine or Montaigne or even Socrates–belong to an extended tradition of “existentialism” is something of an artifact of how these figures were interpreted by Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, and other canonical existentialists. Whatever suspicions this might engender from a purely historical point of view, it is unobjectionable as philosophy–especially existential philosophy, with its insistence that thinking is always a free, creative response to its own history.” — The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Steven Crowell
Saturday, June 13, 2026
Is Life from the Universe God's Plan?
Don’t ask me… https://www.newschannel5.com/plus/issues-of-faith/is-life-from-the-universe-gods-plan
Friday, June 12, 2026
The real world and the lifeworld, & Husserl’s phenomenology
“All ideas are socially constructed. This is an insight that’s probably arisen many times, but I first encountered it in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl was an early twentieth-century philosopher who thought that we could make progress against skepticism by delving into how our consciousness actually experiences the world (a process he called “phenomenology”). In his final book, he applied this process to the concept of science. And he made a basic point: Science doesn’t create the real world. Science doesn’t underpin the real world. Science is something that human beings have derived from the real world. Science is something you learn from books, or something engineers use to make predictions about how substances will act or react. Husserl made a distinction between the scientific idea of the “real world” and the world we actually experience, which he called the “lifeworld” or the “pregiven world.” “The real world” is an abstract plane you hold in your head to allow for the fact that you and I and the city of Istanbul all exist at the same time. And if there’s an earthquake in Istanbul, you know that a bunch of buildings have fallen down in the real world and that this disaster has affected a group of real people who aren’t essentially different from you and me. But in your lifeworld, the earthquake exists as a newspaper story. It exists as tweets and photographs. Everything you know about the real world is mediated through the lifeworld. People in the humanities tend to love this concept, because the lifeworld is, essentially, the domain of the humanities. Human beings in their aggregate—that’s part of the social sciences. But human beings as individuals and how we individually experience the world—that’s the humanities.” — What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia
The real world and the lifeworld, & Husserl’s phenomenology
“All ideas are socially constructed. This is an insight that’s probably arisen many times, but I first encountered it in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl was an early twentieth-century philosopher who thought that we could make progress against skepticism by delving into how our consciousness actually experiences the world (a process he called “phenomenology”). In his final book, he applied this process to the concept of science. And he made a basic point: Science doesn’t create the real world. Science doesn’t underpin the real world. Science is something that human beings have derived from the real world. Science is something you learn from books, or something engineers use to make predictions about how substances will act or react. Husserl made a distinction between the scientific idea of the “real world” and the world we actually experience, which he called the “lifeworld” or the “pregiven world.” “The real world” is an abstract plane you hold in your head to allow for the fact that you and I and the city of Istanbul all exist at the same time. And if there’s an earthquake in Istanbul, you know that a bunch of buildings have fallen down in the real world and that this disaster has affected a group of real people who aren’t essentially different from you and me. But in your lifeworld, the earthquake exists as a newspaper story. It exists as tweets and photographs. Everything you know about the real world is mediated through the lifeworld. People in the humanities tend to love this concept, because the lifeworld is, essentially, the domain of the humanities. Human beings in their aggregate—that’s part of the social sciences. But human beings as individuals and how we individually experience the world—that’s the humanities.” — What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education
https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/eight-predictions-for-the-future-of-higher-education
Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education
https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/eight-predictions-for-the-future-of-higher-education
Meaning gap
“in the very gap between perceiving meaning everywhere and feeling it for yourself, you discover… a renewed consciousness of your own felt life, sharpened precisely because you have just seen how much of the world’s meaning you can recognize but not inhabit…” open.substack.com/pub/nyphilos... https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mnso4lrxec2j
Saturday, June 6, 2026
The darkest question
“…he hoped to avoid the reduction of experience to either “pure ego” or “material substance.” James admitted that “field,” as a vague and necessarily complex metaphor involving a plurality of interacting aspects, would not give “stability.” Indeed, he adds that such an approach results in an “almost maddening restlessness.” James insists, however, that by moving in this direction we gain “concreteness” (T.C., II, 365). He never adequately developed this language of “fields” and “ejects” relative to his doctrine of “pure experience.” This is a real loss, for it should not be overlooked that in contemporary thought, “field” is a highly valuable metaphor in all the major disciplines, precisely because of its ability to convey process and concretion. As an overview, perhaps we should say of his notion of “pure experience” what James himself said in answer to the question, how do finite beings come to be? “Who knows? The question of Being is the darkest in all Philosophy. All of us are beggars here” (S.P.P., 46). Is not the notion of “pure experience,” James’s way of formulating what Parmenides, Schelling and Heidegger look upon as the first, if not perhaps the only question. Why is there something rather than nothing?” — The Writings of William James by John J. McDermott https://a.co/0cODXAOT
Thursday, June 4, 2026
Spiritual & existential judgments
In the opening pages of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James discusses the difference between spiritual judgements and existential ones. He explains that existential judgements are concerned with the nature of things and their origins, whereas spiritual judgements are concerned with the meaning and significance of these things, once they’ve come about. For example, maybe you’ve had a stressful encounter with someone, which gets you thinking: “This person always seems to think the worst of people. I wonder what happened in their childhood that made them that way?” According to James, this is an existential question because it’s trying to get to the bottom of this person’s distressing behavior. How did they learn this behavior? What’s their origin story? These kinds of questions root the meaning of the present in the circumstances of the past. When it comes to spirituality, on the other hand, the most important questions are not, “Why is that person that way? Or, “Why am I the way I am?” But rather, “What’s going on inside me right now? How do I feel about it? And how should I act on these feelings? What do I want to become?” I’d always been inclined to view spirituality as something that led people to get lost in a mystical realm that disconnects them from their day-to-day reality. And this is one reason why I found James’ perspective on spirituality so surprising and refreshing. He insists that spiritual questions are focused on what you’re experiencing right now and why these experiences matter to you. Put another way, spirituality is about being radically present, for yourself and for others. What happened in the past is not irrelevant, and all of the macro-structural forces that impinge on your life circumstances are also not irrelevant. But our inner lives are not just byproducts of the structural and past-oriented narratives that we use to organize our understanding of the world. Spiritual questions train us to use our personal struggles to face up to the indeterminacy of the present moment, which is always overflowing with more possibilities than we are able to imagine or anticipate… Philip Kretsedemas https://open.substack.com/pub/celineleboeuf/p/the-social-sciences-and-spirituality?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
Tuesday, June 2, 2026
a genius of his own kind
“Those thinkers of our time who contend that James is meaningful for contemporary thought because he anticipates certain specific philosophical concerns or analyses of experience, actually sell him short. His relevance lies in his ability to offer philosophical insight of the kind which refuses to be localized by any strictly circumscribed method or doctrine. James was neither a phenomenologist nor an existentialist… to speak of James as a pragmatist is also inadequate. He was a genius of his own kind, who gave to philosophy, largely by virtue of his personal qualities, a perspective and a context wholly novel in implication. With James, the philosophical enterprise begins anew, for if one is imbued with his viewpoint, nothing is seen in quite the same way again. He once said that “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere” (Pragm., 49–50). The most signal instance of this truth is the reading of James himself, who helps us to restructure our very context of apprehension. In the most basic sense, James is a seminal thinker. It is, therefore, extremely important that the public mind, for whom he primarily wrote, more fully realize his originality and relevance. Not only in his inspirational essays, but in his technical thought as well, James had everyday experience in view, and he devoted a long series of lectures and articles to the articulation of psychological and philosophical truths, for the purpose of enhancing the immediate situation. He was, in fact, a meliorist and saw philosophy itself as “the habit of always seeing an alternative” (L.W.J.I, 190).” — The Writings of William James by John J. McDermott https://a.co/0dIDnreO
a genius of his own kind
“Those thinkers of our time who contend that James is meaningful for contemporary thought because he anticipates certain specific philosophical concerns or analyses of experience, actually sell him short. His relevance lies in his ability to offer philosophical insight of the kind which refuses to be localized by any strictly circumscribed method or doctrine. James was neither a phenomenologist nor an existentialist… to speak of James as a pragmatist is also inadequate. He was a genius of his own kind, who gave to philosophy, largely by virtue of his personal qualities, a perspective and a context wholly novel in implication. With James, the philosophical enterprise begins anew, for if one is imbued with his viewpoint, nothing is seen in quite the same way again. He once said that “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere” (Pragm., 49–50). The most signal instance of this truth is the reading of James himself, who helps us to restructure our very context of apprehension. In the most basic sense, James is a seminal thinker. It is, therefore, extremely important that the public mind, for whom he primarily wrote, more fully realize his originality and relevance. Not only in his inspirational essays, but in his technical thought as well, James had everyday experience in view, and he devoted a long series of lectures and articles to the articulation of psychological and philosophical truths, for the purpose of enhancing the immediate situation. He was, in fact, a meliorist and saw philosophy itself as “the habit of always seeing an alternative” (L.W.J.I, 190).” — The Writings of William James by John J. McDermott https://a.co/0dIDnreO
James anticipates the existentialist…
“By assuming the presence of an extra-cognitive source of informing, James anticipates the existentialist, psychoanalytical, and modern aesthetic versions of human knowing. As early as the Principles, James held the “relation of knowing” to be “the most mysterious thing in the world” (Principles, I, 216). Leaving no stone unturned, he opens himself to a variety of experiences not usually found within the ken of philosophical analysis. 59 Some of these experiences have been regarded as beyond the reach of philosophy, as for example, the mystical experiences; while others have often been viewed as the “underworld of philosophy,” as instance the instinctual, the habitual, and, above all, the entire range of phenomena grouped under the heading of extrasensory perception. The latter area of concern, which James called a “wild-beast of the philosophic desert” (P.U., 330), did not endear him to his philosophical colleagues. Yet no matter the origins, James took experiences at dead-reckoning and kept to a minimum the multiplication of concepts stemming from a single experiential root.” — The Writings of William James by John J. McDermott https://a.co/04c7ufAv
James anticipates the existentialist…
“By assuming the presence of an extra-cognitive source of informing, James anticipates the existentialist, psychoanalytical, and modern aesthetic versions of human knowing. As early as the Principles, James held the “relation of knowing” to be “the most mysterious thing in the world” (Principles, I, 216). Leaving no stone unturned, he opens himself to a variety of experiences not usually found within the ken of philosophical analysis. 59 Some of these experiences have been regarded as beyond the reach of philosophy, as for example, the mystical experiences; while others have often been viewed as the “underworld of philosophy,” as instance the instinctual, the habitual, and, above all, the entire range of phenomena grouped under the heading of extrasensory perception. The latter area of concern, which James called a “wild-beast of the philosophic desert” (P.U., 330), did not endear him to his philosophical colleagues. Yet no matter the origins, James took experiences at dead-reckoning and kept to a minimum the multiplication of concepts stemming from a single experiential root.” — The Writings of William James by John J. McDermott https://a.co/04c7ufAv
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Let’s introduce ourselves, Existentialism class of ‘26/'30. Go to the comments space below and tell us who you are, why you’re here, h...
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Starting Sep 10 you can indicate your preference (in the comments' space of this post) for the topic and date of your report presentati...
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PHIL 4200 - Existentialism. Fall 2026. (Syllabus under construction) Dr. Oliver Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu 220 HONR (Honors Building), 300 JUB...
