PHP3786 Existentialism studies the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European movement that made a specific demand of philosophy: that it start from the situation of an actual individual existing in the world — mortal, free, uncertain, and having to decide how to live — rather than from abstract systems about the nature of reality. It is the tradition that produced the claim that existence precedes essence: that there is no fixed human nature determining what we should be, and that we are therefore responsible for what we make of ourselves.
The course is offered at approximately seven Florida institutions, including the University of West Florida, Florida Gulf Coast University, the University of Florida, Florida State University, the University of North Florida, the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida.
At the University of West Florida the course is offered by the Department of History and Philosophy and described as covering basic concepts and ways of experiencing the world through various existential writers, with a reading list that may include Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Florida Gulf Coast University describes the Existentialist movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, focusing on the analysis of concrete human existence, the self, finitude, freedom, and the ethical and psychological dilemmas of nihilism, and requires ENC 1101 and ENC 1102 — the full composition sequence, which signals a writing-intensive course.
The two descriptions are complementary and together define the course well. UWF's names the figures; FGCU's names the problems — concrete existence, the self, finitude, freedom, and nihilism. Those five problems are the course's actual spine, and the figures are different attempts on them.
A caution about the term itself, which the course will address early: "existentialism" is a label applied retrospectively to thinkers who mostly did not use it and who disagreed profoundly. Kierkegaard was a Christian arguing that faith requires a leap beyond reason; Nietzsche announced the death of God and regarded Christianity as a catastrophe; Heidegger rejected the label outright and considered his project fundamental ontology rather than a philosophy of human existence; Sartre accepted it and gave it its most famous formulation. What holds them together is not a doctrine but a shared starting point: the concrete, situated, finite individual, taken as the place philosophy must begin.
The other thing to say plainly is that this material is unusually demanding to read and unusually easy to misread. Existentialist writers frequently wrote in non-standard forms — Kierkegaard under pseudonyms with elaborate irony, Nietzsche in aphorisms, Sartre and Camus in novels and plays alongside treatises — and Heidegger invented a vocabulary that resists translation. Meanwhile the popular reception has flattened the tradition into a mood: black turtlenecks, meaninglessness, a vague permission to do as one likes. The actual arguments are far more rigorous and considerably more demanding than the caricature, and most of them conclude in something closer to an overwhelming account of responsibility than to a licence.
As with the rest of philosophy, the honest account is that this course builds transferable capacities rather than credentials, and that the fields where it pays are not always obvious.
The realistic assessment is that most students take this course as an elective or for humanities credit rather than as career preparation, and its value to them is different: it is one of the few courses that addresses directly the questions students are actually asking themselves at that age — what to do with a life, how to choose without certainty, what freedom costs. That is not a career outcome, and it is a reasonable thing for a university to provide.
UWF lists no prerequisite for PHP 3786. FGCU requires ENC 1101 and ENC 1102 — the full composition sequence — which is an accurate signal: this is a reading- and writing-intensive course, and the writing is analytical rather than expository. Other Florida institutions commonly require an introductory philosophy course or junior standing.
No prior philosophy is strictly required, and the course is popular with non-majors. That said, two things genuinely help. An introductory logic or critical thinking course supplies the argument-reconstruction habit that the course's method depends on. And a history of philosophy course — particularly modern philosophy through Kant and Hegel — makes the tradition far more intelligible, because existentialism is a reaction against something, and the reaction is hard to follow without knowing what it rejected.
PHP3786 is an upper-division elective in the philosophy major and a common humanities elective for other majors, normally taken in the junior or senior year. It sits within the continental tradition alongside phenomenology, nineteenth-century philosophy and contemporary continental courses, and it pairs naturally with courses in twentieth-century literature, film studies and psychology.
The PHP prefix is worth noting: in the SCNS, PHP designates courses organised around a philosophical school or movement, distinguishing them from PHI (general philosophy), PHH (history of philosophy) and PHM (social and political philosophy). A student searching for movement-based courses should look under PHP.
The title Existentialism is stable across Florida institutions, and the subject is consistent. The genuine variation is in the reading list, and it is substantial. UWF's description lists a possible set including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty — note that this is a philosophically demanding list weighted toward the German tradition, including Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty, who many courses omit. Other versions centre on Sartre and Camus with more literary material and less Heidegger; some include substantial Beauvoir; some are organised thematically rather than by figure.
The practical consequence: check which figures your section covers. A course centred on Heidegger's Being and Time is a substantially harder course than one centred on Sartre's popular lecture and Camus's essays, and both are legitimate. If you are transferring the course, expect a receiving department to ask what you read.
PHP3786 carries the same SCNS number across Florida public institutions and SCNS equivalency governs transfer of the credit. As an upper-division course it does not appear in A.A. programmes and is taken after transfer. It frequently satisfies a humanities general education requirement in addition to philosophy elective credit; verify the category at your destination institution.
Three credit hours, approximately 45 contact hours, taught as lecture and seminar discussion; online sections exist. Assessment normally combines analytical essays, examinations with passage identification and argument reconstruction, and discussion participation. Expect seven to ten hours a week outside class.
The reading is the workload, and it is genuinely difficult in a specific way. These texts are not long by humanities standards — The Myth of Sisyphus is short, Fear and Trembling is short — but they are dense, and several of them are deliberately indirect. Heidegger in particular defeats first readings routinely, and that is not a reflection on the reader. Practical advice: read the Stanford Encyclopedia entry before the primary text to get the shape of the argument, then read the text itself slowly, then reread the encyclopaedia entry. And do not assume that a beautiful sentence has been understood — this literature is quotable in a way that encourages the illusion of comprehension.
This course engages directly and sustainedly with death, meaninglessness, despair, anxiety, and suicide. Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus opens by declaring suicide the only serious philosophical problem; Heidegger's analysis of authenticity runs through being-toward-death; Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death is a taxonomy of despair. This material is treated philosophically rather than clinically, and it is not intended to distress — and it can be genuinely difficult for students who are struggling, particularly because it is engaging rather than dry.
Two things are worth stating. First, Camus's argument is an argument against suicide, and the tradition as a whole is more concerned with how to live in the absence of guarantees than with despair as a destination; students who encounter fragments out of context sometimes take the opposite impression. Second, every Florida institution provides free confidential counselling to enrolled students, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text. Using either is ordinary. If this material lands harder than expected, that is worth taking seriously rather than pushing through.
Students arrive with a version of existentialism assembled from quotations, and the course dismantles it productively:
Getting these right is much of the intellectual work of the course, and students generally find the corrected versions more interesting than the slogans.
Existentialism is an unexpectedly apt place to think about these systems, because the tradition's central concepts — freedom, choice, authenticity, bad faith, the constitution of the self — are exactly the concepts people reach for when discussing them, usually imprecisely.
Where the tools genuinely help in this course. These texts are hard, and a model is an effective explainer of a passage you have read and not grasped, a supplier of context for an unfamiliar reference, and a patient answerer of vocabulary questions — which matters enormously for Heidegger, whose terminology is a substantial barrier. Asking what Dasein means, or how facticity relates to transcendence, produces a useful answer. Generating objections to a position you are defending is also legitimate and valuable.
Where they fail, and it is specific to this material. Existentialist writing is quotable, which means the training data contains an enormous quantity of decontextualised quotation and popular misreading — and models reproduce it. They will supply the slogan version of every position listed in the section above. They fabricate quotations in these authors' voices with particular fluency, because the styles are distinctive and imitable. And on translated terms they are frequently imprecise in ways that matter, since a great deal turns on whether Angst is rendered as anxiety or dread, or on what das Man is doing.
Verify every quotation against the assigned translation. This is more than usually important here: a fabricated Nietzsche aphorism sounds exactly like Nietzsche, and a paper built on one is arguing about a text that does not exist.
The deeper limitation, and it is the discipline's own point. Philosophy is taking a position and defending it against the strongest objection. These systems are trained toward balanced treatment of contested questions, which produces the surveyed, non-committal essay that this project's other philosophy guides have also identified as the characteristic weak submission. In existentialism the mismatch is sharper than usual, because the tradition's central claim is that a life is constituted by choices that cannot be evaded — and a fluent refusal to commit is, in the course's own vocabulary, an unusually neat instance of bad faith.
Which is why the best paper topics in this course now involve the technology directly, and instructors increasingly assign them. Does a system that produces text about freedom have anything Sartre would recognise as freedom, given that consciousness for him is precisely the capacity to negate what is given? Is Heidegger's account of Dasein as the entity for whom its own being is an issue satisfied by anything computational, or does it require mortality — being-toward-death — in a way that settles the question? Is outsourcing the decisions that constitute a life to a system that produces the statistically expected answer a technological form of das Man, the anonymous "they" that relieves us of having to choose? These are not gimmick topics. They require the course's full apparatus, they cannot be answered by the tool being discussed, and they connect a nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition to a live question in a way students find genuinely engaging. Follow your instructor's syllabus on permitted use, which governs.
Generated September 6, 2026 · Updated September 6, 2026