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Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine conceived by Martin Heidegger, which describes the nature (sense) of being (ontology, metaphysics) as being here (Ger. Dasein; existence) on earth (being-in-the-world; Ger. In-der-Welt-sein), among things and other people (being-together; Ger. Mitsein). After being captured in 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre, as POW, read it in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, and in 1946 published Existentialism is a Humanism popularizing the doctrine and giving it the name. It took explicit form as a philosophical current in Continental philosophy, first in the work of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in the 1930s in Germany, and then in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s and 1950s in France. Their work focused on such themes as "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, and nothingness" as fundamental to human existence.[1] Walter Kaufmann described existentialism as "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life".[2] Although there are some common tendencies amongst "existentialist" thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them (most notably the divide between atheistic existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Tillich); not all of them accept the validity of the term.[3] A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence. This amounts to the assertion that the outer manifestation (existence) of an entity is more determinative than its inner being (essence). Asserting that "existence precedes essence" is a rebellion against the Platonic Ideas, the Forms, which in Plato's philosophy are the true reality behind appearances of things in the world.
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