- **Epistemic status:** #budding > Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings on the mind when it has once seized on it like lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death. (Shelley 2015, 108 [[#^8b626b]]) Existentialism ponders the problem of human existence, centering on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting of an individual. Existentialist thinkers analyze issues related to the meaning, purpose and value of human existence. For example, the existentialist has a sensation of dread, disorientation, confusion, and anxiety coined “the existential angst” while facing an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Several European philosophers from the 19th and 20th century are associated with existentialism for their shared view on the human subject, even though they had profound differences in thought. The earliest thinkers on existentialism were Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who critiqued rationalism and pondered the issue of meaning. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jasper, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Tillich. Existentialism is generally considered to have been authored by Søren Kierkegaard, but the first notable existentialist philosopher established existentialism as a self-description was Jean-Paul Sartre. The philosopher Frederick Copleston explains ([[#^8cfea1]]) that Sartre postulated the idea that "what all existentialists have in common is a fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence". The philosopher Steven Crowell argues that defining existentialism is relatively difficult and is better understood as a general approach as a tool to reject certain systematic philosophies rather than being a systematic philosophy itself. --- ## References - Copleston, F. C. “Existentialism.” _Philosophy_ 23, no. 84 (1948): 19–37. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100065955>. ^8cfea1 - “Existentialism.” In _Wikipedia_, May 2, 2022. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Existentialism&oldid=1085823657>. - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Barnes & Nobles, 2015. ^8b626b