In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the  history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism. ‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, camus, consciousness, darwin, descartes, existentialism, free will, human agency, human nature, humanism, kierkegaard, marx, morality, religion, sartre