The Making of the Modern Self: Existential Philosophy

This English language course, open to Danish students as well as international students, traces the conception of authentic existence in the works of thinkers from the Existentialist tradition such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Copenhagen’s own Søren Kierkegaard. Among other things, we will observe how ethical thinking has moved from the language of duty to that of personal answerability, and how the search for meaningful personal existence has increasingly become the responsibility of the individual. The unique vocabulary of these authors appears not only in works of philosophy, theology, and psychology, but also literature and theatre, which illustrates that we understand ourselves via the stories we tell, and that these narratives are necessarily told in dialogue with “the Other,” our fellow human beings.