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The godfather of Existentialism and its first principal writer, Søren Kierkegaard, was born in Denmark on this day. He was concerned with living a free and good life, even in the fact of personal tragedy, failure, and anxiety.
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Another proto-Existentialist and the first in the tradition to integrate the philosophy into literature (a hallmark of the genre), Fyodor Dostoevsky, was born in Russia on this day. Concerned, like Kierkegaard, with freedom in the face of oppressive outside powers.
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"Either/Or," one of Kierkegaard's great works, is published. It is concerned with two ways that one might live their life: aesthetically, or ethically. Kierkegaard implicitly comes down on the side of ethics.
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The first great Existentialist work, "Fear and Trembling" confronts the anxieties of life with the joyous belief that to live a good life, ones must stop adhering to convention and prevailing norms.
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Edmund Husserl, the first of the Phenomenologists—a movement that borrows from and contributes to Existentialism in equal measure—is born in Germany on this day. His works brought in Eastern conceptions of time and self to ground a notion of reality and meaning as existing only in direct and lucid experience.
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A scathing denouncement of empirical and rationalist philosophy, positing that life is best lived on its own terms and not those proffered by trumped-up intellectuals, "Notes From Underground" is published on this day.
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The bridge between earlier German and Scandinavian Existentialists and the later wave of French Existentialists is born on this day. His works blend the technical-mindedness of Phenomenology with the freedom and life-affirming nature of later Existentialism. (His personal politics were nonetheless very bad.)
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The premier modern Existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, was born on this day. Credited with both revolutionizing and popularizing the school of thought, this French Existentialist turned a half-formed system of ethics into a massive and far-reaching life philosophy that could both explain phenomena and inspire action.
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Simone de Beauvoir, noted feminist Existentialist and one of the French wave's most enduring voices, was born on this day. Her work, created during a lifetime working relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, furthers Sartre's philosophies of action over inaction and justice over (gendered) injustice.
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A writer-cum-philosopher and the last of the great Existentialists, Albert Camus, who followed in the literature-heavy tradition of Fyodor Dostoevsky to produce some of the French movement's most instantly recognizable works, such as "The Stranger" and "The Fall," was born on this day. A foil to Sartre, Camus' work is typically more cynical and less based in moral action.
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One of the most massive (and massively difficult) works of Existentialist philosophy, "Being and Time" was the first work to offer a complete picture of perception as being integral to understanding the world and others. Philosophers are still trying to unpack its complicated, usually convoluted, ideas.
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Another famous work of Existentialist literature—though a very dry, theoretical one—"Nausea" takes Sartre's main ideas on freedom and presents them in a naturalist setting.
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Existentialism's most popular product, and most people's introduction to the school of thought, is published. The work provides an easy-to-read account of a man who feels existentially isolated—anxious over his radical freedom.
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Camus' major essay, and one that directly responds to the philosophy of Sartre on the topics of radical freedom and the philosophical problem of suicide, is published.
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The 'bible' of French Existentialism, Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" compounded the tradition's maxims, most notably radical freedom, into one volume that posits "existence precedes essence," and that man, famously, is therefore "doomed to be free"—and entirely responsible for his actions and his actions alone.
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The most comprehensive and pointed Existentialist text in support of wide-ranging, revolutionary feminism, "The Second Sex" is published. The work, which criticizes the embedded belief that women are secondary to men, becomes a mainstream philosophical hit.
