School #3
Existentialism
Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger
Existentialism holds that existence precedes essence — human beings are not born with a fixed nature but must create themselves through free choice and commitment. Soren Kierkegaard's 'Either/Or' (1843) and 'Fear and Trembling' (1843) inaugurated this tradition by insisting that authentic selfhood requires passionate, individual decision rather than absorption into abstract systems. Martin Heidegger's 'Being and Time' (1927) recast the question as one of Dasein — human existence as being-toward-death, thrown into a world of concern and possibility. Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' (1943) declared that we are "condemned to be free": consciousness is a nothingness that perpetually transcends every fixed identity, and bad faith is the flight from this radical freedom into the pretense of a settled essence.
Worldview
The existentialist experiences life as a vertiginous freedom set against an indifferent universe. There is no script, no cosmic purpose, no essence preceding the choices one makes — and this realization, once genuinely absorbed, produces both exhilaration and dread. Every moment is laden with the weight of decision, because to exist is to choose, and to choose is to define oneself irrevocably. The world feels contingent, saturated with possibility, and tinged with mortality: Heidegger's being-toward-death means that the awareness of finitude is not morbid but clarifying, stripping away pretense and forcing confrontation with what truly matters. Authenticity — living in full acknowledgment of one's freedom and responsibility — is the existentialist's orienting ideal. The framework classifies this as None: there is no metaphysical agency beyond natural causation — no god, no logos, no spirits writing the script; freedom and meaning are self-authored against an indifferent cosmos. The framework reads this as Constructed moral authority: there is no pre-given Scripture, Tradition, Reason, or universal Experience that hands values down — meaning and value are constituted by the choosing self in situation, and authenticity replaces any external normative ground.
Moral Implications
Because there is no predetermined human nature and no divine commandment that settles ethical questions in advance, the existentialist bears total responsibility for the values they choose to live by. Sartre insists that in choosing for oneself one chooses for all humanity, making every moral decision an act of universal legislation without the comfort of a universal law. Bad faith — the pretense that one "had no choice" or was "just following orders" — is the existentialist's cardinal sin. This framework produces an ethics of radical accountability: one cannot hide behind institutions, traditions, or biological determinism. Compassion arises not from duty but from the recognition that every other person shares the same groundless freedom.
Practical Implications
Existentialism profoundly shapes how one approaches work, relationships, and political engagement. The adherent resists bureaucratic systems that reduce persons to functions, insists on individual accountability in collective action, and views conformity as a form of self-betrayal. In politics, existentialism fueled resistance movements — Sartre and de Beauvoir engaged directly with anti-colonial and feminist struggles, arguing that freedom is not merely individual but must be extended to all. In daily life, the existentialist prioritizes meaningful engagement over comfort, authentic relationships over social performance, and creative self-definition over inherited identity.
⧖
I. Time
Time is emergent, finite, and deeply personal — it is the medium of human freedom and the horizon of mortality. Heidegger's "being-toward-death" makes finitude the defining structure of temporal existence. Time is continuous and linear, flowing irreversibly forward; each moment is an unrepeatable occasion for authentic choice. Existentialism treats time not as an objective container but as the lived texture of human concern.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
✦
II. Space
Space is emergent and finite — it is the "situation" into which the individual is "thrown" (Heidegger's Geworfenheit). The existentialist does not regard space as a neutral container but as the concrete environment that defines one's possibilities and constraints. Space is local: the individual is always situated here, in this particular place, confronting this particular set of circumstances.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Curvature: Flat
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
◉
III. Matter
Matter is emergent — it exists as the facticity that confronts human freedom. The body, the physical world, and the material situation are the "given" that the individual must take up and transcend through choice. Matter is conserved in the sense that physical reality persists regardless of what meaning the individual assigns to it, yet it is non-local in existential significance: the meaning of material circumstances extends beyond their physical boundaries.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
◎
IV. Observer
The observer is radically situated — thrown into a particular time, place, and body, confronting a world that demands choices but offers no universal script. Existence is always a "now" experience, defined by finitude and freedom. Knowledge is personal, subjective, and limited to lived experience; there is no God's-eye view, no total picture to be had. Memory itself is interpretive — the past is never simply recovered but always re-read from the present. The observer is embodied and active: consciousness is not a passive mirror but an engaged, choosing subject that constitutes meaning through its projects. Multiple observers share a world, but each inhabits it from an irreducibly personal perspective.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Extent of Knowledge: Immediate
Retainment of Knowledge: Total
Physicality: Embodied
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: None
Moral Authority: Constructed
Theological Method: N/A
⚡
V. Energy
Energy is emergent and finite — it is part of the factical world that the individual must engage with through authentic action. Conservation holds within the natural order, but for the existentialist, what matters is the lived engagement with finite resources and possibilities. Dispersibility is irreversible, mirroring the irreversibility of time and the finality of human choices.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
⧉
VI. Information
Information has no pre-given meaning or structure; it is constituted by the observer's engagement with the world. The existentialist sees information as emergent from human projects — we create meaning and informational significance through our choices. The framework places this as non-conserved at both scales: there is no cosmic record that preserves meaning beyond human projects, and no personal-identity pattern that survives death — the self ends when the project ends.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Emergent
Cosmic Conservation: Non-conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Experiments This School Responds To (19)
Newcomb's Problem
The premise that a Predictor can anticipate a genuine choice is incoherent. Authentic choice is precisely what cannot be derived from antecedent state; the thought …
The Experience Machine
Authentic existence requires real choice in a real world; the machine substitutes a contentless infinity of feelings for the projects through which one becomes a …
The Trolley Problem
The case forces a false dilemma: real moral life is not a series of stipulated trolley choices, and imagining oneself into them trains us in …
Libet's Free Will Experiments
The experimental setup — flex a finger at a randomly-chosen moment — measures something far from existentially relevant choice. Authentic freedom is a structure of …
Buridan's Ass
A vindication of the priority of choice over reason: the agent must simply choose, and the choice creates the value rather than tracking it. Sartre's …
Frankfurt Cases
The case misdescribes what choice is. Genuine freedom is not about counterfactual alternatives but about the lived experience of taking up a possibility — which …
The Veil of Ignorance
The veil asks us to choose without the particularity that gives choice its meaning. Justice imagined from no one's standpoint is justice imagined for no …
The Violinist
Authentic moral choice resists the stipulative cleanness of the scenario; the lived situation always carries more freight than the thought experiment's setup.
The Drowning Child
The case treats moral life as an algorithm of distance-blind aid; authentic moral existence is always particular, situated, and unable to be reduced to expected-value …
The Repugnant Conclusion
Ethics is not the aggregation of welfare scores. The repugnant conclusion is repugnant because the framework producing it is.
Pascal's Wager
Faith is a leap into a particular existence, not a hedge against eternal outcomes. The wager misdescribes both faith and the self that takes it …
Milgram's Obedience Experiments
Many subjects did resist; the headline figure obscures the moral diversity of responses. Authentic agency was possible — Milgram's subjects who refused are the more …
Asch's Conformity Experiments
Authentic existence requires standing against the herd; the conforming 75% are demonstrations of bad faith, not of human nature. The case is normative, not descriptive.
Eternal Recurrence
The central Nietzschean test: amor fati as the criterion of authentic existence. To affirm recurrence is to take up one's life as one's own; to …
Strawson's Reactive Attitudes
Authentic moral life requires engagement with others as persons; Strawson's point is congenial, though existentialists ground engagement in radical freedom rather than in habitual practice.
Nozick's Tale of the Slave
Authentic freedom is not exhausted by political structure; both the slave and the citizen face the existential task of taking up their freedom. Nozick targets …
Singer's Expanding Circle
Moral life cannot be reduced to a metric of which beings are inside the circle; the deeper question is how authentic moral engagement is sustained …
The Survival Lottery
Authentic moral life cannot be reduced to a lottery procedure; the case dramatises the alienation of impersonal moral aggregation.
Anscombe's Intention
The chosen description an agent endorses is constitutive of their action; existential responsibility includes which descriptions one takes up.
Films Reading Through This School (9)
Blade Runner
Existentialist: the replicants have a hyper-compressed existential situation. With four years of life, the existential question (what kind of being shall I be?) cannot be …
Persona
Elisabet's silence is a Sartrean act: she has chosen to refuse the bad faith of being a public self. Alma's collapse is the cost of …
Synecdoche, New York
The film is a Sartrean fable about a man who cannot inhabit his own life directly and so tries to inhabit it by representing it. …
Memento
Leonard's situation is a structural amplification of Sartrean radical choice: each moment, he must take up a life he cannot remember choosing. The film's final …
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Sartrean: the choice to begin again is existential, not memorial. Memory is the medium ordinary lives use to ground commitment; the film tests whether commitment …
The Truman Show
Truman's choice at the end — to step out into the unknown rather than remain in the constructed world — is existentialist authenticity made cinematic. …
My Dinner with Andre
Both men are existentialists of different stripes: André insists choice must be radical to be real; Wally insists choice happens inside small life-commitments and that …
Under the Skin
In its second half the film becomes an existentialist parable: the creature, having begun to inhabit her body, must take up a life whose terms …
Wittgenstein
Eagleton's screenplay frames Wittgenstein's life as an existentialist working-out: the demand that one's philosophy alter one's life, the rejection of academic respectability, the long unhappiness, …
Debates Where This School Is Allied (15)
Sartre–Heidegger on Humanism
Atheist existentialist
Carnap vs Heidegger on Metaphysics
Existential phenomenologist; thinker of Being
Sartre vs Camus on Revolution
Engaged Marxist existentialist
Sartre vs Camus on Revolution
Existentialist humanist; absurdist
Husserl and Heidegger
Existential / fundamental ontologist
Nietzsche vs Wagner
Philosopher of life; critic of decadence
The Heidegger–Cassirer Davos Disputation
Existential phenomenologist
The Hume–Rousseau Affair
Genevan philosopher; proto-Romantic
Kierkegaard vs Hegel
Christian existentialist
Heidegger vs Levinas
Thinker of Being; fundamental ontology
Heidegger vs Levinas
Ethical phenomenologist; theorist of alterity
Sartre and Beauvoir
Radical existentialist; theorist of consciousness
Sartre and Beauvoir
Situated existentialist; ethical-political philosopher; feminist
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Orthodox Christian novelist of suffering and freedom
Wollstonecraft vs Rousseau on Women
Enlightenment philosopher of education and politics
Works that name Existentialism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
55%
50%
45%
45%
45%
45%
45%
45%
35%
35%
35%
35%
30%
30%
30%
30%
30%
30%
30%
30%
30%
28%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
25%
22%
22%
22%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
20%
18%
18%
18%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
14%
14%
14%
14%
14%
14%
12%
12%
12%
12%
12%
11%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
8%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (Paris, under German occupation)
Fear and Trembling (Early)
Søren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio) · 1843
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 (French two-vol. ed.)
The Sickness Unto Death (Late)
Søren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) · 1849
Either/Or (Early)
Søren Kierkegaard (under the editorship of Victor Eremita) · 1843
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Søren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus) · 1846
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre · 29 October 1945 (Paris lecture); 1946 (published)
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Early)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1947
Nausea (Early (Sartre's first novel, before Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938
No Exit (Mid (alongside Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1944 (first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944)
Philosophy of Existence (Late)
Karl Jaspers · 1938 (German; English 1971)
The Mandarins (Mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1954 (Gallimard; Prix Goncourt 1954)
Being and Time (Early)
Martin Heidegger · 1927 (Jahrbuch für Philosophie publication; only Divisions I and II of the planned three completed)
The Courage to Be
Paul Tillich · 1952 (Terry Lectures, Yale, 1950)
Notes from Underground (Mid (the transition into the great late period))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1864
Man's Search for Meaning (Mid-late)
Viktor E. Frankl · 1946 (German original); 1959 (English translation)
Philosophy (Mid)
Karl Jaspers · 1932 (3 vols; English 1969-71)
Old Age (Late-mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1970 (Gallimard)
The Roads to Freedom (Middle)
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1945-1949 (three published volumes)
Pyrrhus and Cineas (Early)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1944
Epic of Gilgamesh
Anonymous / composite (Sin-leqi-unninni, c. 1200 BCE, final redactor) · c. 2100–1200 BCE (composite)
She Came to Stay (Early)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1937-41 composition; 1943 publication
Pensées
Blaise Pascal · c. 1657–62 (Pascal d. 1662); first published 1670
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1883 (parts I, II); 1884 (III); 1885 (IV, private printing)
The Brothers Karamazov (Late)
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1879–1880 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
The Gay Science (Middle (between Daybreak and Zarathustra))
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882 (first edition, four books); 1887 (second edition, with added fifth book and preface)
The Concept of Anxiety (Mid (the productive year of 1844 — Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, etc.))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1844 (published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis)
Critique of Dialectical Reason (Late (Sartre's major late philosophical work))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1960 (vol. I); vol. II unfinished, published posthumously 1985
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1958 (Gallimard)
Politics and Conscience (Mature (composed during Havel's dissident period before the 1989 Velvet Revolution))
Václav Havel · 1984 (composed in Czechoslovakia under Communist authority; prepared as the acceptance speech for an honorary degree from the University of Toulouse that Havel could not attend)
Disturbing the Peace (Late-dissident (composed three years before the Velvet Revolution))
Václav Havel · 1985-86 (long interview composed by mail between Havel in Prague and Karel Hvížďala in West Germany)
Slavery and Freedom (Late-mature)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1939 (in Russian; English 1944)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Late)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1886
Living in Truth (Mid)
Václav Havel · 1986 (collected essays from 1970s-80s)
Book of Job
Anonymous · c. 6th–4th century BCE
A Defence of True Liberty from Antecedent and Extrinsecal Necessity (Late)
John Bramhall · 1655
The First Man (Final (unfinished))
Albert Camus · c. 1958-1960 (incomplete); 1994 posthumous publication
The Words (Late)
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1963-64 (published 1964)
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus · 1942 (Paris, under German occupation)
What Is Metaphysics? (Early)
Martin Heidegger · 1929 (Freiburg inaugural lecture, 24 July)
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1945
The Stranger (Early (the breakthrough novel))
Albert Camus · 1942 (alongside The Myth of Sisyphus; published in occupied Paris)
The Fall (Late (Camus's last completed novel; the Nobel followed in 1957))
Albert Camus · 1956
Confessions of a Mask (Early (the breakthrough novel that established Mishima's literary reputation))
Yukio Mishima · 1949 (Mishima's breakthrough novel, written at age 24)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Early (the 25-year-old Goethe's breakthrough work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) (Late)
Milan Kundera · 1984
The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (Mid)
Viktor Frankl · 1946
The Castle (Late)
Franz Kafka · 1922 (composed); 1926 (posthumous)
New Testament and Mythology (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1941
A Very Easy Death (Late)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1964 (Gallimard)
Summer Meditations (Late (the first major post-1989 reflection on the transition from dissidence to governance))
Václav Havel · 1991 (Letní přemítání, composed during Havel's first eighteen months as Czechoslovak president after the November 1989 Velvet Revolution)
Essays: First Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Early)
Iris Murdoch · 1953 (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge)
Faust I (Mature)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1772-1806 (composed over 35 years; published 1808)
Giovanni's Room (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1956
The Meaning of the Creative Act (Early-mature)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1916 (Smysl tvorchestva)
Sun and Steel (Late)
Yukio Mishima · 1968
The Memorandum (Early)
Václav Havel · 1965
Reflections on the Guillotine (Late)
Albert Camus · 1957
Castigations of Mr Hobbes (Late)
John Bramhall · 1658
The Adolescent (Late)
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1874-1875
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Early-to-middle)
Martin Heidegger · 1929
Confessions (Early)
Augustine of Hippo · c. 397–400 AD
Apology (Early)
Plato · c. 399–395 BC (shortly after Socrates's death)
On the Genealogy of Morality (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1887 (composed in 20 days)
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Early)
Karl Marx · Paris, summer 1844 (notebook manuscripts; unfinished and unpublished in Marx's lifetime); first published 1932
Beyond Good and Evil (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886
The Birth of Tragedy (Early)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1872 (with "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" preface added 1886)
The Rebel (Late)
Albert Camus · 1951
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Mid (Arendt's breakthrough book))
Hannah Arendt · 1951 (with later editions adding new prefaces and material through 1968)
The Plague (Mid (between The Stranger and The Rebel))
Albert Camus · 1947
Crime and Punishment (Mid (the first of Dostoevsky's great late novels))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1866 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
Philosophical Fragments (Mid (the same productive 1844 as Concept of Anxiety))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1844 (published under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus)
Repetition (Early-mid (the same explosive 1843 as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1843 (published the same day as Fear and Trembling, under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius)
Existence and Existents (Early (the first major book, before Time and the Other))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1935-46 (largely composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp); published 1947
The Imaginary (Early (preceding Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1940
Mrs Dalloway (Mid (the first major modernist novel of Woolf's maturity))
Virginia Woolf · 1925
Hamlet (Mid (mature middle period))
William Shakespeare · c. 1600-01
King Lear (Mid-late (the major tragedies))
William Shakespeare · c. 1605-06
Faust, Part I (Mid (composed across Goethe's career; Part I the major mid-career work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1772-1808 (composed across decades; Part I published 1808; Part II completed 1832, posthumous)
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Mid)
Yukio Mishima · 1956
Eclipse of God (Late)
Martin Buber · 1952
Letters to Olga (Mid (composed during Havel's 1979-83 imprisonment))
Václav Havel · 1979-83 (letters from prison)
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Early)
Paul Ricoeur · 1950 (French; English 1966)
Black Skin, White Masks (Early)
Frantz Fanon · 1952 (French; English 1967)
Truth and Method (Mid)
Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1960 (German; English 1975, 2nd rev. ed. 1989)
Jesus Christ and Mythology (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1958 (Shaffer Lectures at Yale)
Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Late)
Jan Patočka · 1975 (Czech samizdat; revised; English 1996)
Climate and Culture (Fūdo: ningengakuteki kōsatsu) (Mid)
Watsuji Tetsurō · 1935
Religion and Nothingness (Shūkyō to wa nani ka) (Mid)
Nishitani Keiji · 1961
Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) (Mid)
Samuel Beckett · 1948-49 (composed); 1952 (French publication); 1953 (premiere)
The Trial (Der Process) (Late)
Franz Kafka · 1914-15 (composed); 1925 (posthumous)
The Life of the Mind (Late)
Hannah Arendt · 1977-78 (Vol I Thinking; Vol II Willing; Vol III Judging unfinished at her death)
The Star of Redemption (Mid)
Franz Rosenzweig · 1918-19 (composed in trenches); 1921 (published)
Duino Elegies (Late)
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1912-22 (composed at Duino and Muzot); 1923 (published)
Invisible Man (Mid)
Ralph Ellison · 1945-52
Hopscotch (Mid)
Julio Cortázar · 1963 (Spanish Rayuela); 1966 (English)
Men in Dark Times (Late (collected from essays spanning more than a decade))
Hannah Arendt · 1968 (Harcourt Brace; essays composed 1955-67, several in New Yorker, Merkur, etc.)
The Undiscovered Self (Late (one of Jung's last short works, written at 82))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1957 (Schweizer Monatshefte; book edition Rascher, Zurich; English trans. R.F.C. Hull, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1958)
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Last (composed in Rousseau's final two years, after he had retreated from public life))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1776-78 (unfinished at Rousseau's death; published posthumously 1782)
Macbeth (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1606
A Plea for Captain John Brown (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1859 (delivered as a public address in Concord, Boston, and Worcester, October-November 1859; published 1860)
Slavery in Massachusetts (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 (delivered at the antislavery convention, Framingham, July 4, 1854; published in The Liberator and other papers)
Essays: Second Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1844 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Eyeless in Gaza (Mid-mature)
Aldous Huxley · 1936
The Sea of Fertility (Last)
Yukio Mishima · 1965-71 (four-volume tetralogy)
Patriotism (Mid-mature)
Yukio Mishima · 1961 ("Yūkoku")
A Confession (Mid)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1880-82
Resurrection (Late)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1889-1899
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Early)
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1910-11 (drafted), 1915 (published)
Asrar-i Khudi (Secrets of the Self) (Mid)
Muhammad Iqbal · 1915
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Mature)
Yukio Mishima · 1963
To the Castle and Back (Late)
Václav Havel · 2006
Ecclesiastes (Qohelet)
Solomon (traditional attribution); anonymous sage (scholarly consensus: c. 3rd century BCE) · c. 3rd century BCE (traditionally attributed to 10th century BCE)
The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (Late)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1841
A Writer's Diary (Late)
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1873-1881
Another Country (Middle)
James Baldwin · 1962
No Name in the Street (Late)
James Baldwin · 1972
Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Middle (Kehre))
Martin Heidegger · 1936-38 (published posthumously 1989)
Between Man and Man (Middle-to-late)
Martin Buber · 1929-1938 essays; 1947 publication
Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism (Mid-career)
Frederick Copleston · 1956
Plato's Dialectical Ethics (Early)
Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1931
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Late-middle)
Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1976 (essays 1957-1975)
Self-Knowledge (Posthumous)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1949 (posthumous; written through the 1940s)
Act and Being (Early)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1929-30 (habilitation); published 1931
The Beginning and the End (Late)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1947 (Russian original 1941, Paris)
Phenomenology of Spirit (Early)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1806–07 (finished as Napoleon entered Jena)
Letters and Papers from Prison (Late)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1943–45 (Tegel and Flossenbürg prisons); 1951 (first German edition by Eberhard Bethge)
Totality and Infinity (Early)
Emmanuel Levinas · 1961
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 1958
Commentary on Romans (Early)
Karl Barth · 1919 (1st ed.); 1922 (2nd ed., radically revised)
I and Thou (Mid (the foundational statement of dialogical philosophy))
Martin Buber · 1923
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))
Hannah Arendt · 1963 (New Yorker articles 1962-63, then book)
The Will to Believe (Mid (between Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience))
William James · 1897 (title essay, addressed to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown, 1896)
On Revolution (Late (after Eichmann in Jerusalem))
Hannah Arendt · 1963
The Sovereignty of Good (Mid (her major philosophical statement, alongside Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 1992))
Iris Murdoch · 1970 (collecting essays from 1956-67)
The Idiot (Mid (after Crime and Punishment, before Demons and Karamazov))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1868-69 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
Demons (Mid-late (the third of the four great novels))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1871-72 (based partly on the 1869 Nechayev affair)
Practice in Christianity (Late (the last major pseudonymous work; preceding the attack on the Danish state church))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1850 (published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus)
Time and the Other (Early (the breakthrough early work, before Totality and Infinity))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1946-47 (delivered as four lectures at Collège philosophique); published 1948
Difficult Freedom (Mid (alongside Totality and Infinity))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1963 (collecting essays from the 1950s-60s)
To the Lighthouse (Mid (Woolf at the height of her powers))
Virginia Woolf · 1927
The Power of the Powerless (Mid (Havel as principal Charter 77 dissident))
Václav Havel · 1978 (circulated in samizdat in Czechoslovakia)
The Sea of Fertility (Late (the major late work, completed the day of his 1970 ritual suicide))
Yukio Mishima · 1965-70 (Spring Snow 1965-67, Runaway Horses 1967-68, The Temple of Dawn 1968-70, The Decay of the Angel 1970-71)
Runaway Horses (Late)
Yukio Mishima · 1969 (the second of the four Sea of Fertility novels)
Systematic Theology (Mid)
Paul Tillich · 1951-63 (Vol I 1951, Vol II 1957, Vol III 1963)
The Cancer Journals (Mid)
Audre Lorde · 1980
The Symbolism of Evil (Early)
Paul Ricoeur · 1960 (French; English 1967)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Mid)
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer · 1944 (private circulation); 1947 (Amsterdam edition)
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Mid)
Theodor W. Adorno · 1944-47 (composed); 1951 (published)
One-Dimensional Man (Late)
Herbert Marcuse · 1964
The Wretched of the Earth (Late)
Frantz Fanon · 1961 (French; English 1963)
Gender Trouble (Early)
Judith Butler · 1990
Foundations of Christian Faith (Late)
Karl Rahner · 1976 (German; English 1978)
Theology of the New Testament (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1948-53 (Vol I 1948, Vol II 1953; English 1951-55)
The Visible and the Invisible (Late)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1964 (posthumous; composed 1959-61)
The Prose of the World (Mid)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · composed 1950-52; published 1969 (posthumous)
Being Given (Late)
Jean-Luc Marion · 1997 (French; English 2002)
The Essence of Manifestation (Early)
Michel Henry · 1963 (French; English 1973)
The Mystery of Being (Late)
Gabriel Marcel · 1949-50 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)
The Concept of the Political (Mid)
Carl Schmitt · 1932 (revised from 1927 essay; English 1976)
The Feminine Mystique (Late)
Betty Friedan · 1963
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Late)
Jacques Lacan · 1964 (seminar); 1973 (book)
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Late)
Giorgio Agamben · 1995
Philosophy as Metanoetics (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku) (Late)
Tanabe Hajime · 1946
Toward the African Revolution (Late)
Frantz Fanon · 1952-1961 essays; 1964 (collection)
Critique of Cynical Reason (Kritik der zynischen Vernunft) (Mid)
Peter Sloterdijk · 1983
The Destiny of Man (O naznachenii cheloveka) (Mid)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1931
The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) (Late)
Thomas Mann · 1912-24 (composed); 1924 (published)
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Mid)
W.H. Auden · 1944-46 (composed); 1947 (published)
1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Late)
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) · 1949
If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo) (Mid)
Primo Levi · 1947 (rev. 1958)
Oedipus Rex (Early)
Sophocles · c. 429 BCE (first performed at the Dionysia)
Kokoro (Late)
Natsume Sōseki · 1914 (serialized Asahi Shimbun)
Sprachgitter (Mid)
Paul Celan · 1959
Camera Lucida (Late)
Roland Barthes · 1979-80 (Barthes died Mar 1980)
Collected Poems (Late)
W. H. Auden · 1927-73 (composed); 1976 (collected)
The Fire Next Time (Mid)
James Baldwin · 1962-63
Ariel (Late)
Sylvia Plath · 1962-63 (composed); 1965 (posthumous publication ed. Ted Hughes)
Beyond God the Father (Mid)
Mary Daly · 1973
Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (Late (Næss's closing popular statement, written at 86))
Arne Næss · 1998 (Norwegian original Livsfilosofi: Et personlig bidrag om følelser og fornuft, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget); English 2002
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Mature (Lanier's short polemical follow-up to Who Owns the Future?, 2013, and Dawn of the New Everything, 2017))
Jaron Lanier · 2018
On Violence (Late (Arendt's most-cited short political essay, written in response to the 1968 student movements))
Hannah Arendt · 1969 (New York Review of Books, Feb 27); 1970 (Harcourt expanded book edition)
My Bondage and My Freedom (Mature (Douglass's second autobiography, written after his break with Garrison and the founding of his own newspaper))
Frederick Douglass · 1855 (Miller, Orton & Mulligan, New York)
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Late (Douglass's third autobiography, covering his post-1855 political career))
Frederick Douglass · 1881 (Park Publishing, Hartford); expanded edition 1892 (De Wolfe, Fiske, Boston)
Race Matters (Mature (the book that established West as a major public intellectual))
Cornel West · 1993 (Beacon Press; 25th anniversary edition 2017)
The American Evasion of Philosophy (Mature (West's major work of intellectual history, written before the Race Matters celebrity))
Cornel West · 1989 (Wisconsin UP)
Democracy Matters (Late-mature (the post-9/11 sequel to the 1993 Race Matters))
Cornel West · 2004 (Penguin)
Julie (Mature (the literary high-point of Rousseau's career, between Social Contract and Émile))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1761 (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, Amsterdam)
Orlando (Mature)
Virginia Woolf · 1928 (Hogarth Press)
The Waves (Mature)
Virginia Woolf · 1931 (Hogarth Press)
Gyn/Ecology (Mature)
Mary Daly · 1978 (Beacon Press)
Pure Lust (Late-mature)
Mary Daly · 1984 (Beacon Press)
Othello (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04 (first performed Whitehall, 1 November 1604)
Antony and Cleopatra (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1606-07
Measure for Measure (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04
Resistance to Civil Government (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (first published as "Resistance to Civil Government" in Aesthetic Papers; reprinted posthumously as "Civil Disobedience" in 1866)
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Early-mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (composed during Thoreau's Walden Pond years 1845-47; published 1849 at Thoreau's own expense)
The American Scholar (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837 (delivered August 31, 1837, at the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard; first published as An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1837)
Divinity School Address (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838 (delivered July 15, 1838, at Harvard Divinity School; published as An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 1838)
Representative Men (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1850 (Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston; based on lectures delivered 1845-46)
Soliloquies (Early)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1800 (Monologen, Berlin)
Surprised by Joy (Late-mature)
C. S. Lewis · 1955 (Geoffrey Bles, London)
The Sea, The Sea (Late-mature)
Iris Murdoch · 1978 (Chatto & Windus); Booker Prize 1978
The Black Prince (Mature)
Iris Murdoch · 1973 (Chatto & Windus); James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1973
The Inward Journey (Late-mature)
Howard Thurman · 1961
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Early)
James Baldwin · 1953
Notes of a Native Son (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1955
A Madman's Diary (Mid-mature)
Lu Xun · 1918
The True Story of Ah Q (Mature)
Lu Xun · 1921-22
Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 2008
The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (Late)
Simone Weil · 1939 (written), 1940-41 (published in Cahiers du Sud)
Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression (Early)
Simone Weil · 1934
What I Believe (Mid)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1883-84
Ash-Wednesday (Mid)
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1927-1930
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1795-96 (composed), 1796 (published)
Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1796-97 (composed, unfinished), 1798 (posthumous publication)
Javid Nama (Book of Eternity) (Late)
Muhammad Iqbal · 1932
Dreams from My Father (Early)
Barack H. Obama · 1995
Conversations with Myself (Late)
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela · c. 1962-2010 (materials); 2010 (compiled)
Wandering (Panghuang) (Mid)
Lu Xun · 1926
Wild Grass (Yecao) (Mid)
Lu Xun · 1924-26 prose-poems; 1927 collection
On the Theology of Death (Mid)
Karl Rahner · 1958
If Beale Street Could Talk (Late)
James Baldwin · 1974
Book of Psalms (traditionally attributed)
King David (traditional attribution; composite authorship per scholarly consensus) · c. 1000–300 BCE (traditional: c. 1000 BCE; critical: composed over centuries)
Mind: A Brief Introduction (Late)
John Searle · 2004
Cartesian Meditations (Late)
Edmund Husserl · 1929 (Sorbonne lectures); 1931 (French publication); 1950 (German publication)
Letter on Humanism (Late)
Martin Heidegger · 1946 (drafted as a letter to Jean Beaufret); 1947 (published)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792 (London, six weeks)
Crito (Early)
Plato · c. 399–395 BC (composed shortly after Socrates's death)
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Early)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1799 (anonymous first ed.); 1806, 1821, 1831 (revised eds with explanations)
The Cost of Discipleship (Early)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1937
The Question Concerning Technology (Late)
Martin Heidegger · 1953 (Munich lecture); 1954 (published)
Logical Investigations (Early (the breakthrough work that founds phenomenology))
Edmund Husserl · 1900 (vol. 1, Prolegomena to Pure Logic); 1901 (vol. 2, six investigations); revised editions 1913, 1921
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (Mid (the transcendental turn))
Edmund Husserl · 1913
The History of Sexuality (Late (his last major project))
Michel Foucault · 1976 (vol. 1); 1984 (vols. 2-3, shortly before Foucault's death); vol. 4 (Confessions of the Flesh) published posthumously 2018
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Mid (the breakthrough book))
Richard Rorty · 1979
The Nature and Destiny of Man (Mid-late (Niebuhr's major systematic work))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1941 (vol. I, Human Nature); 1943 (vol. II, Human Destiny) — based on the Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, 1939
Otherwise than Being (Late (the more radical successor to Totality and Infinity, 1961))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1974
The Acting Person (Mid (his major academic-philosophical work, before his 1978 papal election))
Karol Józef Wojtyła / Pope John Paul II · 1969 (the philosophical magnum opus of his pre-papal academic career)
Sister Outsider (Mid (the major prose collection of Lorde's career))
Audre Lorde · 1984 (collecting essays and speeches from the 1970s and early 1980s)
Madness and Civilization (Early (Foucault's breakthrough work, his doctoral dissertation))
Michel Foucault · 1961 (Foucault's doctoral dissertation)
Death and the King's Horseman (Mid (the major play of Soyinka's career))
Wole Soyinka · 1975
The Savage Mind (Mid (the systematic statement of structural anthropology))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1962
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Early (the first of Douglass's three autobiographies))
Frederick Douglass · 1845
Six Crises (Mid (pre-presidential, post-1960 defeat))
Richard M. Nixon · 1962 (after Nixon's 1960 presidential defeat to Kennedy)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1989
Beloved (Mid (the Pulitzer-winning major novel))
Toni Morrison · 1987
Aké: The Years of Childhood (Mid)
Wole Soyinka · 1981
Time and Narrative (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 1983-85 (3 vols; English 1984-88)
Oneself as Another (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 1990 (French; English 1992)
Memory, History, Forgetting (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 2000 (French; English 2004)
Writing and Difference (Early)
Jacques Derrida · 1967 (French; English 1978)
Negative Dialectics (Late)
Theodor W. Adorno · 1966 (German; English 1973)
Eros and Civilization (Mid)
Herbert Marcuse · 1955
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Mid)
Jürgen Habermas · 1985 (German; English 1987)
Bodies That Matter (Early)
Judith Butler · 1993
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Early)
bell hooks · 1984
Difference and Repetition (Différence et Répétition) (Mid)
Gilles Deleuze · 1968
Écrits (Mid)
Jacques Lacan · 1966 (essays 1936-66)
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Pouvoirs de l'horreur) (Mid)
Julia Kristeva · 1980
Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum, de l'autre femme) (Mid)
Luce Irigaray · 1974
The Claim of Reason (Mid)
Stanley Cavell · 1979
Athens and Jerusalem (Athènes et Jérusalem) (Late)
Lev Shestov · 1938
Don Quixote (El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) (Late)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605 (Part I); 1615 (Part II)
The Sound and the Fury (Mid)
William Faulkner · 1929
Escape from Freedom (Mid)
Erich Fromm · 1941
God in Search of Man (Late)
Abraham Joshua Heschel · 1955
Austerlitz (Late)
W.G. Sebald · 2001
A Doll's House (Mid)
Henrik Ibsen · 1879 (first performed Copenhagen)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Late)
Oscar Wilde · 1890 (Lippincott's); 1891 (revised book)
Disgrace (Late)
J. M. Coetzee · 1999
The Old Man and the Sea (Late)
Ernest Hemingway · 1952
Motivation and Personality (Mid)
Abraham Maslow · 1954 (1st ed.); 1970 (rev. 2nd ed.)
Requiem (Late)
Anna Akhmatova · 1935-61 (composed and memorized); 1963 (first published abroad); 1987 (in USSR)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Mid)
James Joyce · 1903-15 (composed); 1914-15 (serialized in The Egoist); 1916 (book)
My Brilliant Friend (Late)
Elena Ferrante · 2011 (Italian L'amica geniale); 2012 (English)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Late)
Haruki Murakami · 1994-95 (Japanese 3 vols.); 1997 (English single volume)
The Golden Notebook (Mid)
Doris Lessing · 1957-62
God of the Oppressed (Mid)
James H. Cone · 1975
Self-Reliance (Mid)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (in Essays: First Series)
Civil Disobedience (Mid)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (as Resistance to Civil Government in Aesthetic Papers); retitled Civil Disobedience 1866 (posthumous)
The Power of Now (Late)
Eckhart Tolle · 1997 (Canada); 2004 (revised US)
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Late (Husserl's last work, written in Freiburg under Nazi proscription))
Edmund Husserl · 1934-37 (parts I & II in Philosophia 1936; full edition Husserliana VI, 1954)
Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (Early (the work that launched Rousseau's career))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1750 (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, Geneva)
Three Guineas (Late)
Virginia Woolf · 1938 (Hogarth Press)
Between the Acts (Last)
Virginia Woolf · 1940-41 (Hogarth, posthumous July 1941; Woolf died March 28, 1941)
The Christian Faith (Mature)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1821-22 (first edition); substantially revised 1830-31 (second edition, the standard form)
A Pluralistic Universe (Late)
William James · 1909 (Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, May 1908)
Purgatorio (Mature)
Dante Alighieri · c. 1314-19
Parable of the Sower (Mature)
Octavia E. Butler · 1993
Parable of the Talents (Late-mature)
Octavia E. Butler · 1998 (Nebula 1999)
Faust II (Last)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1825-31 (completed shortly before Goethe's 1832 death; published posthumously 1832)
Personas with Existentialism as a declared influence
60% Jean-Paul Sartre
55% Simone de Beauvoir
35% Friedrich Nietzsche
30% Gilgamesh Epic (traditional/anonymous)
25% Hannah Arendt
25% Jean-Jacques Rousseau
25% Albert Camus
25% Virginia Woolf
25% Václav Havel
25% Martin Heidegger
25% Job (traditional)
20% Audre Lorde
20% Frantz Fanon
15% Frederick Douglass
15% Karol Józef Wojtyła / Pope John Paul II
15% Wole Soyinka
15% Arthur Schopenhauer
15% Lu Xun
15% Yukio Mishima
10% Jacques Derrida
10% Solomon (traditional)
10% Thespis
10% King David
-10% Iris Murdoch
How Existentialism resolves each dilemma
56 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 13 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 1 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(24/208)
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
The heat death of the universe — entropy maxed out, no further work possible — is among the more sobering implications of mainstream physics. Whether it is structurally inescapable depends on what kind of finitude the cosmos has.
The cosmos has bounds; heat death is a real horizon.
On this view, time itself is finite — the universe had a beginning and will have an end. Heat death (or whatever the actual end-state turns out to be) is a real horizon, structurally implied by the kind of cosmos we live in.
Roads not taken
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing. (47%) ·
Time both has and lacks bounds depending on the level you ask at; finitude is conventional. (26%) ·
Both time and matter are unbounded; 'running out' is misframed. (15%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(24/208)
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Whether we can grow our way out of resource constraints — or whether the cosmos sets limits the economy ultimately must obey — depends on what kind of finitude matter has.
Resources are finite in the strict sense; living well requires accepting the limit.
On this view, the cosmos is bounded in both time and matter; resources are categorically not renewable beyond what cosmic processes provide. Practical limits and metaphysical limits coincide. Living well means living within limits, not engineering around them.
Roads not taken
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time. (47%) ·
The finitude question is level-dependent; resource ethics happens at the level that constrains us. (26%) ·
Resources are practically inexhaustible on cosmic scales; terrestrial limits are engineering. (15%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(24/208)
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
If we owe future people a habitable planet and the material means to flourish, and the cosmos is bounded in ways that make those obligations impossible at some scale, the obligation and the possibility come apart. Where they come apart turns on what kind of finitude we live in.
The cosmos is bounded; our obligations to future generations are bounded with it.
On this view, the cosmos has limits; the obligation to future people is real but cannot exceed what the limits allow. The categorical worry about owing the impossible doesn't arise: the limits bound the asking. Ethics within a created or bounded order is the only …
Roads not taken
Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide. (47%) ·
The owing-and-possibility question is level-dependent; we owe what is appropriate at the level we act on. (26%) ·
Both time and matter are unbounded; we cannot in principle owe more than is possible. (15%)
6 mainstream positions
Do you really choose?
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it.
69%
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
69%
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible.
69%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Future people are as real as you are — and their interests count for as much.
47%
Is regret rational?
The past is as real as the present; regret is a real attitude toward a real thing.
47%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Extinct species are as real as we are; they have standing.
47%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 4 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it.
On this view, money is exactly what societies do that performs the monetary functions. There is no fact about whether something is 'really' money beyond whether it is used as money. A community that decides shell beads or carbon credits or proof-of-work hashes count as …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (55%) ·
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people. (14%) ·
“Money” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery.
On this view, nations are made: by treaties, by wars, by deliberate institution-building, by the slow work of collective practice. There is nothing intrinsic about a national kind; what exists is the practice. What we owe the nation is what we owe any institution we …
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (55%) ·
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people. (14%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice.
On this view, while biological features exist, what they socially mean — what counts as a man or a woman, what roles attach, how the categories are policed and revised — is the work of social practice. The categories are real but constructed; revising them …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (55%) ·
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition. (14%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other.
On this view, biological facts about the genome exist, but what we count as 'human nature' is downstream of practice. The germline is one more thing humans now have technical access to; the question is not whether the practice transgresses an essence but whether the …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (55%) ·
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric. (14%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
3 mainstream positions
Is the world created from nothing?
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance.
56%
Is the physical world fully real?
Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting.
56%
Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good.
56%
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(29/208)
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
There was never a fixed self to either preserve or lose.
On these views, what we call a self was always a stream of experience, a constructed narrative, a process — never a thing whose continuity could be the question. Dementia, upload, transformation, death are stages in a process, not events that either preserve or destroy …
Roads not taken
You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity. (36%) ·
You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect. (30%) ·
You span moments — identity is a pattern that need not be located at a single now. (9%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(29/208)
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Loss of memory, of recognition, of the cognitive patterns that made the person — does this end the person, or merely the person you knew? The answer turns on what makes someone who they are.
There was no fixed person to lose; care is owed to whoever is here.
On these views, the person their spouse married was never a fixed thing whose continuation could be tracked across time. There has always been a stream of experiences, a developing character, a construction. Dementia is one of the more visible changes in the process; the …
Roads not taken
Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed. (36%) ·
The soul persists; the cognitive change is the body's, not the person's. (30%) ·
The person is the pattern across moments — diminished pattern, diminished person. (9%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(29/208)
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The Star Trek transporter problem: a machine scans your body atom by atom, transmits the pattern, builds an exact duplicate at the destination, and dismantles the original. Whether you arrive at the destination or die in the scanner is the question; the answer depends on what you are.
There was no fixed you to either survive or fail to; the question is malformed.
On these views, the question presupposes a fixed self whose continuity is the issue. There isn't one. The teleporter case feels more troubling than ordinary sleep, dementia, or growth, but the framework is the same: a stream of experience stops at the scanner, a new …
Roads not taken
Different body, different person — you died in the scanner. (36%) ·
The soul accompanies the person; engineering can't transfer it. (30%) ·
You are the pattern; the pattern survives the substrate change. You arrive. (9%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop.
On this view, personhood is not a status conferred at a moment but a property of beings with certain capacities — to feel, to suffer, to prefer, eventually to reflect. A zygote has none of these; a late-term fetus has many; a newborn has most. …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (55%) ·
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation. (14%) ·
The question presupposes a fact of the matter that isn’t there. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it.
On this view, marriage is a human institution shaped by law, custom, and the agreements of those who enter it. There is no fixed essence to discover, only practices to negotiate. As societies change — granting women legal personhood, recognizing no-fault divorce, extending the institution …
Roads not taken
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. (55%) ·
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates. (14%) ·
“Marriage” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
31 mainstream positions
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is real but always known from a perspective.
16%
Could causation work backwards?
Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural.
68%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction.
68%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description.
68%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation.
66%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial.
66%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current.
66%
What is our place in nature?
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform.
50%
Should we colonize space?
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship.
50%
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Genetic modification is cultivation by other means.
50%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally.
50%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for.
47%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is exactly what the math says it is. The pattern is in the noticer.
47%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The observer is in time; foreknowledge across times raises real freedom problems.
46%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditators are bounded observers reporting unusual brain states; the 'timeless' is metaphorical.
46%
Does prayer change God's mind?
If there is an addressee at all, it is in time; prayer is communication, and may genuinely change what comes next.
46%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Observers are bounded by their own moment, and no further agency makes the dead present.
43%
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
The category does not apply — the school is non-religious.
42%
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
The discrete person is the moral primary.
38%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous fields, classical limits, analog deep structure.
36%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous Jamesian stream, phenomenological lived time.
36%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Reconstructed — continuous re-narrating, no fixed engrams.
36%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is not where the deepest truth lives.
36%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Animal minds are real because biology is the substrate of mind.
31%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Brain tissue can in principle do what brains do; the question is integration.
31%
What happens to "you" when you die?
Death is genuinely the end.
29%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
No — mind is what a biological brain does, and an LLM has no brain.
29%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust the practice, not the practitioner.
13%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
'Revelation' is a category communities construct for what counts as authoritative.
13%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
Whether an LLM 'knows' is the constructive question the practice has to answer.
13%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through careful description of lived experience.
12%
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone.
50%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys.
50%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible.
50%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away.
50%
Jump to school (208)
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15
#16
#17
#18
#19
#20
#21
#22
#23
#24
#25
#26
#27
#28
#29
#30
#31
#32
#33
#34
#35
#36
#37
#38
#39
#40
#41
#42
#43
#44
#45
#46
#47
#48
#49
#50
#51
#52
#53
#54
#55
#56
#57
#58
#59
#60
#61
#62
#63
#64
#65
#66
#67
#68
#69
#70
#71
#72
#73
#74
#75
#76
#77
#78
#79
#80
#81
#82
#83
#84
#85
#86
#87
#88
#89
#90
#91
#92
#93
#94
#95
#96
#97
#98
#99
#100
#101
#102
#103
#104
#105
#106
#107
#108
#109
#110
#111
#112
#113
#114
#115
#116
#117
#118
#119
#120
#121
#122
#123
#124
#125
#126
#127
#128
#129
#130
#131
#132
#133
#134
#135
#136
#137
#138
#139
#140
#141
#142
#143
#144
#145
#146
#147
#148
#149
#150
#151
#152
#153
#154
#155
#156
#157
#158
#159
#160
#161
#162
#163
#164
#165
#166
#167
#168
#169
#170
#171
#172
#173
#174
#175
#176
#177
#178
#179
#180
#181
#182
#183
#184
#185
#186
#187
#188
#189
#190
#191
#192
#193
#194
#195
#196
#197
#198
#199
#200
#201
#202
#203
#204
#205
#206
#207
#208