Editing Existentialism (section)

== Etymology ==
The term ''existentialism'' ({{langx|fr|L'existentialisme}}) was coined by the [[Roman Catholicism in France|French Catholic]] philosopher [[Gabriel Marcel]] in the mid-1940s.{{sfn|Cooper|1990|p=1}}{{sfn|Flynn|2006|p=89}}<ref name="Christine Daigle 2006, page 5">{{cite book |first=Christine |last=Daigle |title=Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics |publisher=[[McGill-Queen's University Press]] |date=2006 |page=5}}</ref> When Marcel first applied the term to [[Jean-Paul Sartre]], at a colloquium in 1945, Sartre rejected it.<ref>
Ann Fulton, ''Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963'', Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, p. 12-13 & 18–19.</ref> Sartre subsequently changed his mind and, on October 29, 1945, publicly adopted the existentialist label in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in [[Paris]], published as {{lang|fr|[[L'existentialisme est un humanisme]]}} (''Existentialism Is a Humanism''), a short book that helped popularize existentialist thought.<ref>''L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme'' (Editions Nagel, 1946); ''English'' Jean-Paul Sartre, ''Existentialism and Humanism'' (Eyre Methuen, 1948).</ref> Marcel later came to reject the label himself in favour of ''Neo-Socratic'', in honor of Kierkegaard's essay "[[On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates|On the Concept of Irony]]".

Some scholars argue that the term should be used to refer only to the cultural movement in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Sartre, [[Simone de Beauvoir]], [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]], and [[Albert Camus]].{{sfn|Crowell|2020}} Others extend the term to Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as far back as [[Socrates]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Crowell |first=Steven |title=The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism |location=Cambridge |date=2011 |page=316}}</ref> However, it is often identified with the philosophical views of Sartre.{{sfn|Crowell|2020}}