Existential Philosophy

Please write a 3500-4000 word paper where you compare three thinkers (at least two of whom should be conventionally understood as “existential”) on a single issue. You should be seeking for a synthesis of ideas, rather than agreeing with one over the others.

A) Pick no more than two from the following list:

Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky

B) Pick at least one from the following list:

(Martin) Heidegger, (Emmanuel) Levinas, (Simone) de Beauvoir, (Gabriel) Marcel, (Karl) Jaspers, (Hannah) Arendt, (Martin) Buber, (William) James, (Franz) Rosenzweig, (Paul) Tillich

C) If you have fewer than three thinkers after A and B, feel free to choose whichever third figure your would like to discuss that will add to your paper.

Possible topics could include:

-Comparing Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Jasper’s philosophy of time.

-Comparing Marcel, Heidegger and Sartre on “thrownness”

-Comparing Kierkegaard, Marcel, and Tillich on existential Christianity

-Comparing Levinas, Buber and Rosenzweig on existential Judaism

-Comparing Heidegger, Sartre and (Walter) Benjamin on “authenticity”

-Comparing James, Freud and Sartre on existential psychoanalysis

-Comparing Arendt, Sartre and Marx on philosophies of politics

-Comparing what makes the literature of Dostoevsky, Sartre and Camus existential (or Milan Kundera or Naguib Mafouz or Gabriel García Márquez or any other literature with existential themes)

Your paper should engage with at least three peer-reviewed journal articles as well as the primary texts from the authors you choose. Papers need an abstract (150 – 250 words), a title page and a reference page–these do not count toward your word count. APA style.