Existentialism

Existentialism took off in mid-twentieth-century France, against the backdrop of the Second World War, and is most closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Its thinkers begin from the situation of the individual who exists before any fixed essence or purpose, and must take responsibility for the self they make through their choices. They looked back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as forerunners and drew heavily on Heidegger.