Core Theses
Consciousness is always consciousness of something (intentionality).
Bracket (epoché) assumptions about the external world and describe what is given.
Philosophy starts from lived experience, not scientific abstraction.
Edmund Husserl founded it with the Logical Investigations (1900–01). His assistant Martin Heidegger transformed it into an analysis of being-in-the-world; Jean-Paul Sartre learned it in Berlin in 1933 and made it the basis of Being and Nothingness.
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Martin Heidegger
The philosopher of Being, who argued that the West had forgotten the question of what it means to be, and analysed human existence (Dasein) as thrown, anxious, being-toward-death.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The face of French existentialism — existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, and hell is other people.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
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related by shared connectionsExistentialism
The philosophy of the existing individual — freedom, anxiety, authenticity, the absurd — running from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus.
Bad Faith
Self-deception about one’s own freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined by role or nature, to escape the anguish of choice.
Bhartṛhari
The 5th-century philosopher of language who taught that ultimate reality is the Word (śabda-brahman), that meaning flashes forth as a whole (sphoṭa), and that all knowledge is shot through with language — and, by tradition, the poet of the Three Centuries on love, worldly wisdom and renunciation.
Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad
The shortest Upaniṣad — twelve verses on the syllable Oṃ and the four states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, deep sleep and the “fourth” (turīya), the pure Self. Said to be enough, by itself, for liberation.
Taittirīya Upaniṣad
The Upaniṣad of the five sheaths and the graduation address — it defines Brahman as “truth, knowledge, infinity”, peels away the layers of the self from food to bliss, measures the bliss of Brahman, and tells departing students “Treat your mother as a god.”
Existence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s formula — humans have no pre-given nature; we exist first and make ourselves through our choices.