Existentialism holds that individuals are solely responsible for creating meaning and purpose in their own lives. It focuses on themes of dread, boredom, alienation, freedom, and the absurd. Existentialists believe existence precedes essence, meaning people define their own reality rather than having an essential human nature. Positivism takes a skeptical yet pragmatic approach, asserting that meaningful statements must be empirically verifiable or logically proven. Logical positivism further developed these ideas, proposing a verification criterion of meaning and analyzing moral language as expressions of feeling rather than claims of objective truth.

1. Existentialism and
positivism
Cathy Atuhaire
BNS,PPM

2. Definition
• Existentialism is a philosophical
movement which claims that individual
human beings have full responsibility for
creating the meanings of their own lives .

3. THEMES
• Dread.
• Boredom
• Alienation.
• The absurd.
• Freedom.
• Commitment.
• Nothingness".

4. MAJOR CONCEPTS
• Descartes believed humans could doubt all existence,
but could not will away or doubt the thinking
consciousness, whose reality is therefore more certain
than any other reality.
• Existentialism decisively rejects this argument, asserting
instead that as conscious beings, humans would always
find themselves already in a world, a prior context and a
history that is given to consciousness, and that humans
cannot think away that world. It is inherent and
indubitably linked to consciousness.
• In other words, the ultimate and unquestionable reality
is not thinking consciousness but, according to
Heidegger, "being in the world".

5. CONCEPTS CONT.
• Existence precedes essence
• That a human being's existence precedes
and is more fundamental than any
meaning which may be ascribed to human
life: humans define their own reality.

6. cont
• How did I get into the world?
• Why was I not asked about it
• why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but
just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a
peddling shanghaier of human beings?
• How did I get involved in this big enterprise called
actuality?
• Why should I be involved? ,Isn't it a matter of choice?
• And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the
manager I have something to say about this. Is there no
manager?
• To whom shall I make my complaint?

7. Cont.
• Heidegger coined the term "thrownness" to
describe this idea that human beings are
"thrown" into existence without having chosen it .
• If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is
indefinable, it is because at first he is
nothing. Only afterward will he be
something, and he himself will have made
what he will be".

8. Cont.
• Kierkegaard also focussed on the deep
anxiety of human existence — the
feeling that there is no purpose, indeed
nothing, at its core. Finding a way to
counter this nothingness, by embracing
existence, is the fundamental theme of
existentialism

9. Cont.
• Reason as a defense against anxiety
• Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on
what has meaning to them rather than what is rational.
• Rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of
existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety
and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and
our awareness of death.
• Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter
their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world. "If I can
believe that I am rational and everyone else is rational then I have
nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being free."

10. Cont.
• Sartre saw rationality as a form of "bad faith ," an
attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of
phenomena — "the other .
• Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach
humans that "the other" has order and structure.For
Camus, when an individual "consciousness," longing for
order, collides with "the other's" lack of order, a third
element is born: "the absurd .“
• Meaning is not provided by the natural order, but rather
can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by
human beings' actions and interpretations.

11. Cont.
• Belief in God is a personal choice made
on the basis of a passion, of faith,
observation, or experience.
• Just as atheistic existentialists can freely
choose not to believe, theistic
existentialists can freely choose to believe
in God and could, despite one's doubt,
have faith that God exists and that God is
good.

12. Cont.
• A third type of existentialism is agnostic
existentialism.
• The agnostic existentialist makes no claim to know, or
not know, if there is a "greater picture" in play; he
recognizes that the greatest truth is that which he
chooses to act upon. He feels that to know the "greater
picture," whether there is one or not, is impossible for
human minds—or, if it is not impossible, that at least
they have not found it yet.
• Like Christian existentialists, the agnostic believes
existence is subjective. However one feels about the
issue, through the agnostic existentialist's perspective,
the act of finding knowledge of the existence of God
often has little value because he feels it to be
impossible, and believes it to be useless.

13. Complications of failing to find
meaning
• Behavioural problems
• Anxiety.
• Terror (dying).

14. POSITIVISM
• Existential positivism is positive practical
philosophy. It builds from a base of pragmatic
scepticism, and is closely related to, though not
strictly dependent on existential
expressionism.
• It bears on philosophical matters which depend
in some way on subjective values, or upon
some other kind of essential reference to our
personal feelings and intuitions.

15. POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY
• A philosophical synthesis from elements of
the rational/empiricist and the
romantic/existential aspects of western
philosophy, overlaid on a substratum
(naive philosophy) which is sceptical and
expressionistic. In its less romantic
elements the position is sceptical and in
some respects positivistic, but the
philosophy is also I hope, positive in a
more ordinary sense.

16. Logical Positivism
• Introduction
• First-person observations from
experience.
• This movement offered a powerful vision
of the possibilities for modern knowledge.

17. Doctrines of Logical Positivism
• Language
• Truth
• Logic
• verificationism proposes that assertions are
meaningful only when their content meets a
(minimal) condition about the ways in which we
would go about determining their truth.
• The major point is that much of what we try to
say is meaningless blather.

18. The Logical Construction of the
World
• Cautious observation of nature comprises
a great deal of worthwhile human
knowledge.
• The logical rigor of articles like "Testability
and Meaning .

19. Ethical Emotivism
• Attributions of value are not easily verifiable, so
moral judgments may be neither true nor false,
but as meaningless as those of metaphysics
• Members of a society express their feelings
about human behavior of various sorts.
• stevenson worked out the full implications of
postivistic theories for expressions of moral
praise or blame.

20. Cont.
• Analysis of moral language should focus
instead on its unique function as a guide to
human behavior, what Stevenson called
the "magnetism" of moral terms.