ABSTRACT
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-) seem like a mere aggregate of thinkers. Jaspers, a German thinker who coined the phrase Existenz Philosophie, was influential in making known Kierkegaard’s importance. Marcel was a French dramatist with a love of music who came to philosophy from a background in idealism, against which he struggled. Yet the influence, for instance, of Royce, the first person on whom he wrote, was strong. Bergson, now a too neglected thinker, was always in the background. Marcel’s Catholicism was extremely significant, yet he bridled at the label ‘Christian Existentialist’. He was a philosopher who happened to be a Catholic. Levinas was instrumental in introducing phenomenology to France. In 1930 he published a book on Husserl’s theory of intuition that was to excite Sartre to say: That is the way I want to philosophize! Yet Levinas always thought in tension with this phenomenological heritage, and most especially its transformation in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.
