Undergraduate Module Descriptor

PHL2002: Existentialism

This module descriptor refers to the 2019/0 academic year.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Indicative Reading List:

Readings will primarily come from the following two anthologies:

1. Basic Writings of Existentialism, edited by Gordon Marino (Modern Library, 2004)

2.Existentialism Basic Writings, Second Edition, Edited by Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom (Hackett Publishing, 2001).

Indicative readings will include extracts from the following philosophical and literary works:

  1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
  2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
  3. 3.   Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’
  4. 4.   Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
  5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others
  6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
  7. 7.   Albert Camus, The Outsider
  8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
  9. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
  10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
  11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
  12. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
  13. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
  14. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

Selected Secondary Texts:

  1. A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism – edited by H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall (Blackwell Publishers)
  2. The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism ­– edited by S. Crowell (Cambridge University Press)
  3. Iris Murdoch – Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
  4. Iris Murdoch – Essays on “Encountering Existentialism” from Existentialists and Mystics.