If you believe that life should be a quest for values, reasons, and purpose—filled with passion and governed by individual responsibility—then yours is the sort of mind to which the Existentialist philosophers were speaking.
More than a half-century after it burst upon the intellectual scene, Existentialism has continued to exert a profound attraction for individuals driven to re-examine life's most fundamental questions of individual responsibility, morality, and personal freedom.

What is life?
What is my place in it?
What choices does this obligate me to make?

Professor Solomon is Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin. He has written several books on a variety of philosophical topics that have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Course Lecture Titles

1. What Is Existentialism?
2. Albert Camus—The Stranger, Part I
3. Camus—The Stranger, Part II
4. Camus—The Myth of Sisyphus
5. Camus—The Plague and The Fall
6. Camus—The Fall, Part II
7. Søren Kierkegaard—“On Becoming a Christian”
8. Kierkegaard on Subjective Truth
9. Kierkegaard's Existential Dialectic
10. Friedrich Nietzsche on Nihilism and the Death of God
11. Nietzsche, the “Immoralist”
12. Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate, and Responsibility
13. Nietzsche—The Übermensch and the Will to Power
14. Three Grand Inquisitors—Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hesse
15. Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology
16. Heidegger on the World and the Self
17. Heidegger on “Authenticity”
18. Jean-Paul Sartre at War
19. Sartre on Emotions and Responsibility
20. Sartres Phenomenology
21. Sartre on “Bad Faith”
22. Sartre’s Being-for-Others and No Exit
23. Sartre on Sex and Love
24. From Existentialism to Postmodernism