School · 1859 CE–1986 CE
Existentialism and phenomenology
Phenomenological and existential thinkers analyzed lived experience, freedom, situated embodiment, relations with others, and the ways social worlds constrain possible lives.
Shared questions
- How do freedom and responsibility take shape within embodied and historically situated lives?
Internal disagreements
- Whether consciousness, existence, embodiment, history, or interpersonal recognition provides the best starting point.
Key texts
- Logical Investigations · 1900–1901 — Husserl's founding work, which he substantially revised in a second edition his students contested.
- Being and Nothingness · 1943 — Sartre's ontology of freedom, written under the Occupation and published to immediate influence.
- The Second Sex · 1949 — Beauvoir's study of woman as the Other was long read through Sartre's categories rather than on its own terms.