Today, on renewing your mind, you didn't choose to be born

where you were born. You didn't choose the parents that you have or the culture in which you live.

You experienced a sense of having simply been hurled into time and hurled in the space

chaotically. For no purpose and no great reason, you're simply there.

Now, that is the gloomy perspective of Martin Heidegger, a prominent 20th century philosopher.

And we see the ripples of his thought in our society today, don't we?

The randomness and meaninglessness of life can be seen and felt everywhere we turn.

We're glad you could be with us today as we focus on our C-Sprull series, The Consequences of Ideas.

And we'll explore a pessimistic line of reasoning today. And here's the question that we need to consider.

Is life more than chaos and despair?

Somebody would have asked me who I thought were the two most important philosophers of the 20th century.

It may seem like a difficult task to identify them. We have many to choose from.

People like Dewey and Pierce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, AJ Air, Anthony Flue, Merlot Ponte, Herbert Marcusa,

and a host of others. But for me, it's a no-brainer. I think that the two most influential and important philosophers of the 20th century

are Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Sartre, of course, being French and Heidegger being German.

And both of them are associated with the broad school of existentialism, though Heidegger and Sartre both studied under the same professor Edmund Husserl,

who was the leading voice in his day of the philosophy of phenomenology.

And sometimes technically people will distinguish between existentialism and phenomenology and set particularly Heidegger in a different category.

But in the broad sense of the term existential, I think we can apply it to both of these men who have made an enormous impact on the thinking of 20th century scholars.

Heidegger was born in 1889 and died in 1976. Sartre was born in 1905 and died in 1980. Sartre, very much like Kierkegaard,

combined literary gifts of great, extraordinary genius with a technical grasp of some of the deepest questions of abstract philosophy.

And Sartre was famous for publishing his plays such as his fictional works like The Flies and The Drama, No Exit.

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