Abstract
The introductory chapter considers different approaches to twentieth-century existentialism and the various figures associated with it. It makes clear the author’s own view, suggests a revised chronology of existentialism, and explains the choice of the three thinkers—Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel—chosen for detailed comparative study. It ends by surveying critically the main contributions to religious existentialism.
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Notes
- 1.
In the 2016 edition of the hitherto unpublished Filosofía lógica, the editors justify the publication of a manuscript whose merit Unamuno himself must have doubted, since he left it forgotten in a drawer all his life, by claiming that it is an early example of Unamuno’s mature philosophy and vital attitudes. Far from anticipating his later philosophy, the only aspect worthy of note that I can detect in this youthful work is Unamuno’s recognition of the importance that language plays in all philosophical speculation, something he learned from Wilhelm von Humboldt whilst researching in his early twenties for his doctorate on the Basque language. For the rest, Filosofía lógica is typical of the kind of manual much used in Spanish oposiciones or competitive examinations for state jobs, based on second-hand information and written in the cold, impersonal, logical style of pretentious philosophizing which Unamuno was later to deplore.
- 2.
A few years after Berdyaev, Marcel said much the same thing, namely that with Heidegger we are ‘in the presence of a secularized form of certain traditional theological themes’ (PRM: 114).
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Longhurst, C.A. (2021). Introduction: Existentialism, Religious and Non-Religious. In: Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_1
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