Existentialism
The catalogue includes 12 thinkers in Existentialism.
How these pages are made
Each school page lists the thinkers in our catalogue who belong to this tradition (primary school or recorded affiliation). Dates, works and bios come from the same catalogue as the app. We do not write original essays about the school.
Thinkers in this tradition
- Jean-Paul Sartre1905 – 1980
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was the leading figure of French existentialism. He argued that 'existence precedes essence': humans are not born with a fixed nature but create themselves through choices. A prolific…
- Viktor Frankl1905 – 1997
Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy — a school of psychotherapy focused on finding meaning in life. His book 'Man's Search for Meaning'…
- Simone de Beauvoir1908 – 1986
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, and feminist activist. Her groundbreaking treatise 'The Second Sex' is considered a foundational text of modern feminism. A lifelong…
- Fyodor Dostoevsky1821 – 1881
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century…
- Hannah Arendt1906 – 1975
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-American political theorist whose work deals with the nature of power, authority, and totalitarianism. Fleeing Nazi Germany as a stateless refugee, she became one of the most…
- Søren Kierkegaard1813 – 1855
Danish philosopher and theologian regarded as the father of existentialism, whose writings explored anxiety, despair, and the individual's relationship to faith.
- Karl Jaspers1883 – 1969
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German psychiatrist turned existential philosopher who insisted that genuine philosophy belongs to every human being, not to a guild. His General Psychopathology reshaped psychiatry; his…
- Fernando Pessoa1888 – 1935
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was a Portuguese poet and prose writer who turned the modern question of the self into a literary architecture. Through his heteronyms — Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and…
- José Ortega y Gasset1883 – 1955
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist who founded the Revista de Occidente and led the philosophical generation that gave Spain its first European voice since the seventeenth century.…
- Miguel de Unamuno1864 – 1936
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) was a Basque-Spanish philosopher, novelist, poet, and rector of the University of Salamanca whose Tragic Sense of Life (1913) is the most important religious-existential book written in…
- María Zambrano1904 – 1991
María Zambrano (1904–1991) was a Spanish philosopher, student of Ortega y Gasset and Zubiri, who spent forty-five years in exile after the Republic fell and developed a "poetic reason" that thinks in the gap between…
- Gabriel Marcel1889 – 1973
Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) was a French philosopher and playwright, the leading voice of Christian existentialism — a label he himself resisted. In Being and Having and The Mystery of Being he distinguished problems we…