Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Existentialism has an interesting place in philosophy and the history of philosophy.

Many of you might know that modern Western philosophy can often be divided very roughly into two parts.

There's sort of the analytic tradition with logic and mathematics and

epistemology and metaphysics and a scientific outlook.

Then there is the continental tradition, which is more about the human side of things.

Reading texts, interpreting things, more philosophy as literature than philosophy as science.

In that classification, existentialism is absolutely on the continental side of things.

The image that gets conjured up is people in France sitting around a cafe table,

either drinking coffee or cocktails, smoking cigarettes, talking about the meaning of life, right?

But in some ways, existentialism is a response, a taking seriously,

to and of the scientific view of the world.

The existentialism grew out of concerns on the part of people like Nietzsche and Kyrgyzgaard

and Dostoevsky that the world was becoming disenchanted, that we didn't have the rules that had

been handed down by God anymore. We had to find meaning for ourselves.

There's a motto in existentialism that existence precedes essence.

In other words, things exist. That's what actually is out there in the world.

And the essence of a thing, the thing that makes a rock a rock or a person a person in some way,

these are categories that we human beings attach to them, which is actually a very modern,

scientific way of thinking about things. It's very in tune with poetic naturalism, I should say.

So today, we're going to talk about existentialism with SkyCleari, who is an expert in the subject

and the author of a new book, How to Be Authentic, Simondibivwar and the Quest for fulfillment.

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