Existentialism represents a protest against the rationalism of traditional philosophy against
misleading notions of the bourgeois culture and the dehumanizing values of industrial
civilization. Since alienation loneliness and self-estrangement constitute threats to human
personality in the modern world existential thought has viewed as its cardinal concerns a
quest for subjective truth a reaction against the negation of Being and a perennial search for
freedom. From the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates to the twentieth century French
philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and other thinkers have dealt with this tragic sense of
ontological reality - the human situation within a comic context The book put forward is the
beginning of an attempt to revive existentialism by addressing these issues. The idea is
eventually to present a conception of personhood that is recognizably existentialist or
similar to that presented by writers like Kierkegaard Heidegger Jaspers and Sartre in
certain fundamental ways but that takes into account the last twenty years of developments in
the many different areas of philosophy that directly affect our understanding of what it is to
be a person. The result will hopefully be a more sophisticated existentialist theory of
personhood that can be presented in contemporary terms as a serious challenge to current dogmas
in metaphysics and moral theory and be defended against the ascendant naturalistic
rationalistic or pragmatist alternatives.
