existentialisms

Noun

existentialism (countable and uncountable, plural existentialisms)

1. (uncountable) A 20th-century philosophical movement emphasizing the uniqueness of each human existence in freely making its self-defining choices; also (generally), a philosophy which emphasizes existence over essence.
   • The heyday of existentialism occurred in the mid-twentieth century.

   Antonyms:

   noumenalism

2. (countable) The philosophical views of a particular thinker associated with the existentialist movement.
   • Sartre’s existentialism is atheistic, but the existentialism of Marcel is distinctly Christian.
3. (historical, uncountable) Synonym of structuralism (“a school of thought that focuses on exploring the individual elements of consciousness, how they are organized into more complex experiences, and how these mental phenomena correlate with physical events”).
   • I sought to 'psychologise' [Franz] Brentano's act as being, existentially, the temporal factor intrinsic to psychological subject-matter. […] My attempt sprang, indeed, from a rather desperate desire somehow to bring intentionalism and existentialism together at close quarters, and to transcend the...1922 January, E[dward] B[radford] Titchener, “Functional Psychology and the Psychology of Act: II”, in Edward Bradford Titchener, editor, The American Journal of Psychology, volume XXXIII, number 1...

   Synonyms:

   structuralism