Existentialism and Absurdism

Existentialism is a term applied to a group of attitudes current to philosophical, religious, and artistic thought during and after WW II. In modern expression it had its beginning in the writing of the nineteenth century Danish Theologian Soren Kierkegaard. The German Philosopher Martin Heidegger is important in its formulation, and the French novelist-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has done most to give it its present form and popularity. Existentialism has found art and literature to be unusually effective methods of expression in the novels of Franz Kafka, Dostoyefski, Camu, and Simone de Beauvoir, and in the plays and novels of Sartre; it has found its most persuasive media.…