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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (135197)	7/29/2013 10:01:59 AM
From: Metacomet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

No way that we could come to any sort of agreement over this terminology Philosophers have been trying for decades to do this, and can't The concepts are simply too subjective to get beyond the solipsistic limitations ...I'll go with Bob Corbett's attempt to bound the concepts as I understand them: However, I can define certain characterists that most Existentialists (and precursors to Existentialism) seem to share: they are obsessed with how to live one's life and believe that philosophical and psychological inquiry can help. they believe there are certain questions that everyone must deal with (if they are to take human life seriously), and that these are special -- existential -- questions. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence, the place of God in human existence, the meaning of value, interpersonal relationship, the place of self-reflective conscious knowledge of one's self in existing. Note that the existentialists on this characterization don't pay much attention to "social" questions such as the politics of life and what "social" responsibility the society or state has. They focus almost exclusively on the individual. By and large Existentialists believe that life is very difficult and that it doesn't have an "objective" or universally known value, but that the individual must create value by affiriming it and living it, not by talking about it. Existential choices and values are primarily demonstrated in ACT not in words. Given that one is focusing on individual existence and the "existential" struggles (that is, in making decisions that are meaningful in everyday life), they often find that literary characterizations rather than more abstract philosophical thinking, are the best ways to elucidate existential struggles. They tend to take freedom of the will, the human power to do or not do, as absolutely obvious. Now and again there are arguments for free will in Existentialist literature, but even in these arguments, one gets the distinct sense that the arguments are not for themselves, but for "outsiders." Inside the movement, free will is axiomatic, it is intuitively obvious, it is the backdrop of all else that goes on. There are certainly exceptions to each of these things, but this is sort of a placing of the existentialist-like positions. www2.webster.edu