DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, & Being-in-the-World
One could raise a valid critique that the most glaring weakness of existentialism is that it is too abstract; it could be said that it deals too much in theory, is too complicated, and not grounded enough to be useful in everyday life. However, not every existentialist thought the same way. Some even challenged that same abstractness, including one Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty was a twentieth-century French philosopher who is often grouped with his contemporaries––especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he studied alongside at the École Normale Supérieure––as an existentialist. Being strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger helps bolster this notion.
DE Weekly: Meaning, Ex Nihilo, & the Chasm of Existence
For those not entirely familiar with existentialism, a pervasive mistake that can be made is to conflate the philosophy with nihilism, and to associate the beliefs of one with the other. In fact, even if you do have a solid understanding of existential philosophy, the two can sometimes bleed into one another.
The reason I like to differentiate between the two and really hammer home the fact that existentialism is not nihilist in its underlying beliefs is that I really do not have patience for nihilists and nihilism in general.