Most Famous Existentialism Philosophers

Existentialism is a philosophical movement, mainly twentieth-century, that emphasizes individual existence, freedom, and choice in a universe lacking pre-given meaning. Its precursors include Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; its central twentieth-century figures include Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir. Common themes include authenticity, anxiety, alienation, the absurd, and the responsibility imposed by freedom. Existentialist thought reshaped literature, theology, psychology, and political theory. The movement crosses both religious and atheistic strands.

Philosophers in this tradition

Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980 · French
Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th-century French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist, the leading public exponent of existentialism in the post-war period. His m...
Albert Camus 1913 – 1960 · French
Albert Camus was a 20th-century French philosopher, novelist, and journalist, born in French Algeria, who developed the philosophical position known as absurdism. His 1942 essay...
Luigi Pareyson 1918 – 1991 · Italian
Luigi Pareyson was an Italian philosopher of existence, hermeneutics, and aesthetics and the principal architect of Italian personalism in the second half of the twentieth centu...
Soren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855 · Danish
Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author, widely regarded as the first existentialist thinker. His pseudonymous works, including...
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 · German
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, classical philologist, and cultural critic. He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, declaring that ...
Karl Jaspers 1883 – 1969 · German
Karl Jaspers was a 20th-century German philosopher and psychiatrist, one of the founders of existentialism and a major figure of mid-20th century European thought. His early wor...
Gabriel Marcel 1889 – 1973 · French
Gabriel Marcel was a French Catholic existentialist philosopher, dramatist, and music critic. Often called the first French existentialist, he distinguished his thought sharply ...
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908 – 1961 · French
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20th-century French phenomenologist and one of the most original philosophers of the post-war French tradition. His 1945 work Phenomenology of Percep...
Nikolai Berdyaev 1874 – 1948 · Russian
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher. After early involvement with Marxism and a brief imprisonment under the Tsar, he turned to Ch...
Martin Heidegger 1889 – 1976 · German
Martin Heidegger was a 20th-century German philosopher whose 1927 work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) is one of the most influential texts of contemporary continental philosophy...
Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986 · French
Simone de Beauvoir was a 20th-century French philosopher, writer, and political activist, a central figure of post-war French existentialism and a foundational thinker of modern...
Nicola Abbagnano 1901 – 1990 · Italian
Nicola Abbagnano was an Italian philosopher and the principal architect of what he called positive existentialism. After early work in Naples and many years as professor at Turi...
Jean Wahl 1888 – 1974 · French
Jean Andre Wahl was a French philosopher and poet and the principal channel by which Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the wider current of existentialism reached French philosophical edu...
Lev Shestov 1866 – 1938 · Russian
Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian Jewish religious-existentialist philosopher who emigrated after the Bolshevik revolution and spent the rest of his life in Paris. Through re...