Here’s the reading list. There are infinite good ways to teach Existentialism, and this reading list is pretty canon... https://substack.com/@skyecleary/note/c-327678948?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
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Sep 8:
One of the most common college courses for Philosophy PhDs in the US who specialize in European philosophy to be asked to teach is Existentialism.1 I was asked to teach it for the first time in Fall 2017 at Scripps College, a stone’s throw from where I currently teach. At the time, it sounded fun, but I didn’t think I agreed by and large with Existentialism. Sure, I worked on Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most famous existentialist thinkers, but I didn’t really work on Sartre or any of the other well-known existentialist guys. I had the impression, like a lot of people coming out of my graduate program, that existentialism was a teenage boy philosophy: cute for a phase when you needed to stake your independence, but immature after a certain point. (This is one surprising feature of academic philosophy: Existentialism is a commonly-taught course but is currently unpopular among scholars of Continental European philosophy.)
Teaching that course changed things for me: it planted the seeds for my becoming an existentialist. As I read and re-read material from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, and more, I started to see that most of the philosophy I liked best - from the post-existential period of French philosophy often referred to under the umbrella of poststructuralism - was already in some sense in existentialism. But what’s more, existentialism tackled head-on the ethical and political issues to which poststructuralism often paid lip service but never quite seemed to satisfyingly address. The following summer, at sea about what was next for me professionally when the prospect of a tenure-track job seemed completely out of reach, I did little other than read Being and Nothingness cover to cover. It got in my bones, and I followed it up a few years later with a reread of Being and Time. My academic course changed and I found myself swapping the Derrida and Butler for Sartre and Kierkegaard. I also found that there’s a lot of excellent contemporary analytic existential philosophy (which I previously would have discounted as a contradiction in terms), among which I would count Christine Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity, Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement, and Matthew Boyle’s Transparency and Reflection.
As a result, I got interested in reviving existential philosophy within my subfield of Continental European philosophy. To that end, I wrote a book, which will come out next summer in my favorite philosophy series, arguing that phenomenology (which is a popular subfield relative to existentialism) should be existential phenomenology. It’s a book about the self, but this methodological argument is key to it.
I’ve continued to teach Existentialism every couple of years since, often tweaking my syllabus. In particular, I love how existentialism was very much a public-facing philosophy movement in twentieth-century France: its participants didn’t just write treatises but also plays, novels, public speeches, magazine articles, political journals, and so forth. Sarah Bakewell’s book At the Existentialist Cafe does an excellent job of painting a picture of this landscape. So I’ve sometimes included public-facing assignments for my college students such as social media threads, videos, and posts.
But the core reading list has remained, and I’m sharing it here with my Substack subscribers over the next few months along with a series of video lectures, audio recordings, and other material. I don’t think this is the only possible reading list for Existentialism, but I do think it works well for introducing some core influential ideas that speak to one another, and giving students a solid basis in texts that are often difficult to understand on one’s own (and which they can then follow up on with other texts that are more accessible)...
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