Etymology The term existentialism () was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s. When Marcel first applied the term to Jean-Paul Sartre, at a colloquium in 1945, Sartre rejected it.Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, p. 12-13 & 18–19. Sartre subsequently changed his mind and, on October 29, 1945, publicly adopted the existentialist label in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris, published as (Existentialism Is a Humanism), a short book that helped popularize existentialist thought.L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Editions Nagel, 1946); English Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Eyre Methuen, 1948). Marcel later came to reject the label himself in favour of Neo-Socratic, in honor of Kierkegaard's essay "On the Concept of Irony".
Etymology The term existentialism () was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s. When Marcel first applied the term to Jean-Paul Sartre, at a colloquium in 1945, Sartre rejected it.Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, p. 12-13 & 18–19. Sartre subsequently changed his mind and, on October 29, 1945, publicly adopted the existentialist label in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris, published as (Existentialism Is a Humanism), a short book that helped popularize existentialist thought.L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Editions Nagel, 1946); English Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Eyre Methuen, 1948) Marcel later came to reject the label himself in favour of Neo-Socratic, in honor of Kierkegaard's essay "On .the Concept of Irony".