DE Weekly: Husserl, Aristotle, & Pyrrhonism
Would you believe me if I told you the ideas that led to the development of Existentialism appeared as early as the fourth century BC? The ideas I mean are those of suspension of judgment toward what we perceive, skepticism about the order of things, and the desire to adopt a tranquil disposition in relation to the world and the human condition.
Traditionally, philosophical ideas that we would call “existential” in nature are traced back to Søren Kierkegaard, the eighteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian who approached the ideas through a Christian lens.
DE Weekly: Zeno’s Paradox, Husserl, & Epoché
As much as it owes to the millennia of philosophy that came before it, existentialism is a revolutionary philosophy in that it sought to view the world and existence in a different way than past philosophers had done. The concept that “existence precedes essence” is a pretty good example of how the existentialists aimed to turn Aristotelian metaphysics on its head.
The existentialists weren’t all contrarians, though, nor did they set themselves miles apart from every philosophical conclusion of the past. This holds true for pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea.