Philosophical existentialism is the philosophical view that human beings must create or assume responsibility for meaning and values through their own choices and actions in a world that provides no guaranteed purpose. Existentialism is often regarded as a response to nihilism, the philosophical position that existence lacks inherent meaning, value, purpose, or objective foundation. It can take the form of ethical nihilism (denial of objective moral values), nihilism about truth and knowledge, and existential nihilism (the denial that human life has intrinsic meaning or purpose). In modern philosophy, nihilism is especially associated with Nietzsche, who treated it less as a doctrine to be affirmed than as a historical crisis arising from the collapse of inherited religious and metaphysical values. In this course, we will consider whether existentialism has the conceptual resources to address nihilistic worries, (i) showing that the nihilist perspective is unstable / confused. (ii) identifying the features of a worldview that give rise to nihilistic concerns and acknowledging the partial legitimacy of those concerns in spite of its conceptual and existential weaknesses; and (iii) examining a range of existentialist attempts to address them. We will be working with figures like: Kierkegaard,  Nietzsche, Doetoevski, Turgenev, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Murdoch, Cornel West, and Foucault.