Colin asked:

What is a clear and concise definition of existentialism? All of the definitions I have read up to this
point have only left me confused. I had a professor in college, Harvey Rabbin, who said that squirrels
can not have existential thoughts because they do not contemplate their own deaths. I have just
started the first Philosophy class to be offered at my high school, and I have found that high-school
students are very receptive to philosophy. Is Philosophy offered in secondary school in England?

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Existentialism can be defined by no means as a school of thought. For it has no confirmed students
save Jean-Paul Sartre. In addition, it cannot be confined into a philosophy of it's own, but instead a
tenet of thinking that many "philosophers" have shared in a period of time. Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Jaspers, Sartre, Heidegger, the poet Rilke, Albert Camus, Ortega, and arguably, Husserl
are the major thinkers who share existentialist ideas — though fragments of ideas in regard to
existentialism can be traced throughout the history of all philosophy.

One definite characteristic of existentialist ideas revolves around the need to reform philosophy and
either abandon the Greek foundations, or denounce the past two millennium's movements of Greek
philosophical progression. My definition of existentialism (in its most clear and concise approach) is:

'A movement of ideas beginning in the 19th Century which sought to severe thought from
dependence on the traditional Greek modes of thinking and acknowledged a possibility of the
existence of all things preceding the essence of all things. The movement was, significantly
expressed, unlike other philosophical patterns, through the arts (primarily poetry, fiction, and
painting).'

Cole Lejean