Aug 11, 2019

Seven Videos on Gabriel Marcel's On The Ontological Mystery


Earlier this summer, I created a number of new core concept videos as resources for my students enrolled in my online Existentialist Philosophy and Literature (taught for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design).  This opened up an opportunity to shoot a sequence on one of my favorite works of the often overlooked French Catholic Existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, his essay "Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery" (which you can find here, along with his play, The Broken World)

The reason I selected that essay (and provided that play as a supplemental reading) for the class is that it is probably the best introduction not only to some of the central themes of Marcel's philosophy - the distinction between problem and mystery, the dangers of a functionalized world, reinterpretation of faith, hope, and charity, and the need for ontological depth - but also to Marcel himself.  It is an essay he references frequently throughout his other works.

Marcel was one of the first authors to use the term "existentialist" and "existentialism" in French.  He would later abandon the title for his own work after Jean-Paul Sartre more or less took it over in his "Existentialism is a Humanism" (as would Heidegger), but Marcel remains a central figure within the broad Existentialist movement.

In any case, here are those seven videos.  I plan to shoot some additional ones on this work, hopefully later on this Fall.

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