Existentialism: What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.

Friday, 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...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/world/europe/france-education-high-school-philosophy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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Understood backwards, lived forwards

Texts Fall '26

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger,... Mariana Allesandri, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods... Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept...Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction... The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction... RECOMMENDED (& on library reserve): Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe... Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters... Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife... Soren Kierkegaard, tba... William James, What Makes a Life Significant; Is Life Worth Living; On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; tba...

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Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)

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The Essence of Humanism (1905)

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Existentialism

Friday, June 19, 2026

What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.

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What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.

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