About this item
Existentialism offers enduring lessons and insight on how to understand ourselves and improve our lives.Your existence is not the result of a pre-determined set of events, it's the direct result of your thinking and your actions, and therefore, according to Soren Kierkegaard, Frederick Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and other Existentialist philosophers, you have the freedom to control the outcome of your existence - sophisticated "philosophy meets psychology" self-help for the twenty-first-century.As Kierkegaard and his ilk made clear in their respective works, human beings are moody creatures. Rather than understanding moods such as anxiety and depression as afflictions that can only be treated with a pill, the Existentialists regard these troublesome feelings as instructive, something revealing about what it means to be human.
About the Author
Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Professor Marino took his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Before coming to St. Olaf in 1995, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Virginia Military Institute.
A recipient of the Richard J. Davis Ethics Award for excellence in writing on ethics and the law, Marino is the author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, and editor of the Modern Library's Basic Writings of Existentialism and Ethics: The Essential Writings. In addition to his scholarly publications, Marino's essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and many other national and international publications.
A former boxer, Dr. Marino has been a USA Boxing coach since 1995. He was the head coach of boxing at Virginia Military Institute and currently trains both amateurs and professionals in Minnesota. He is also an award-winning boxing writer for among other venues, the Wall Street Journal.
