Existentialism

“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”
~ Woody Allen

Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings have full responsibility for creating the meanings of their own lives. It is a reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, which sought to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world. The movement had its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was prevalent in Continental philosophy. In the 1940s and 1950s, French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus wrote scholarly and fictional works that helped to popularize themes associated with existentialism: “dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness”.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Existentialism

http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/existentialism.htm

http://www.eng.anarchopedia.org/Existentialism#cite_note-0

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism