DE Weekly: Existence, Essence, & the Cosmic Lottery
Every now and then, I come across a post online, usually accompanied by a graphic of some sort, that says something like, “If you were born in North America, remember that you had a 3.04% chance of being born there. How lucky you are!”
The same graphic contrasts this claim by saying the chances of you being born in Asia was 49.69%, and your chances of being born on the African continent 34.87%.
DE Weekly: Existentialism, Humanism, & Life as a Project
Existentialism sometimes has a rap for being a rather convoluted philosophy. We can assign blame to its most famous authors, I think, for that perception; Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the like wrote in such a way that many of the philosophy’s takeaways seem abstruse to the average reader.
This being the case, if we were to pose the question, “What is Existentialism?”, where would we begin? It’s unhelpful when those like Albert Camus and even Sartre himself rejected the term “existentialist.”