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or mood rather than a set of deductively related theses, and existentialism attained its zenith in Europe following the
disenchant-ments of the Second World War. However, the first significant thinker to stress such themes was
*Kierkegaard, whose work is generally regarded as the origin of existentialism. Existentialist writing both reacts against
the view that the universe is a closed, coherent, intelligible system, and finch the resulting contingency a cause for
lamentation. In the face of an indifferent universe we are thrown back upon our own freedom. Acting *authentically
becomes acting in the light of the open space of possibilities that the world allows. Different writers who united in
stressing the importance of these themes nevertheless developed very different ethical and metaphysical systems as a
consequence. In *Heidegger existentialism turns into scholastic *ontology; in *Sartre into a dramatic exploration of
moments of choice and stress; in the theologians *Barth, *Tillich, and *Bultmann it becomes a device for reinventing
the relationships between people and God. Existentialism never took firm root outside continental Europe, and many
philosophers have voiced mistrust of particular existentialist concerns, for example with *being and non-being, or with
the *libertarian flavour of its analysis of *free will.

existential proposition See quantifier.

existential psychology A school of psychology emphasizing the need for understand-inS patients by means of a grasp of
their total orientation towards the world. It is therefore opposed to reductionism, *behaviourism, and scientific methods
that objectify the patient in psychology. The principal impact of the approach has been on techniques of psychotherapy.

existential quantifier See quantifier, variable.

exoteric The opposite of esoteric: opinions suitable for the uninitiated.

expected utility In *decision theory, the expected utility of an outcome is the utility that is assigned to its occurrence,
multiplied by the probability of its occurrence. The central concept was first formulated by Christian Huygens (1629-
95).

experience Along with *consciousness, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily
thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and bearing at best problematic relationships to
any other events, such as happenings in an external world or similar streams in other possessors. The stream makes up
the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and the world, and in spite
of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge: both *idealism and *scepticism are
common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of
experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle
as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing
that experiences have contents: it is the world itself that they represent to us as being one way or another, and how we
take the world to be is publicly manifested by our words and behaviour. My own relationship with my experience itself
involves memory, recognition, and description, all of which arise from skills that are equally exercised in interpersonal
transactions. Recently emphasis has also been placed on the way in which experience should be regarded as a
'construct', or the upshot of the workings of many cognitive sub-systems (although this idea was familiar to *Kant, who
thought of experience as itself synthesized by various active operations of the mind). The extent to which these moves
undermine the distinction between 'what it is like from the inside' and how things are objectively is fiercely debated. It
is also widely recognized that such developments tend to blur the line between experience and theory, making it harder
to formulate traditional doctrines such as *empiricism.

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