ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that existentialism arosed as an attack on idealism, including subjective idealism. The label "existentialism" itself may offer equally good testimony. Philosophers and geographers have long argued about the nature of space. The ostensibly new frontiers of geographic thought have arisen to challenge, though not necessarily to abandon, the spirit of an objective, value-free, and rigorously quantitative science, at least insofar as that science deals with man. The epistemological formula is aimed to overcome the historic dualism of much Western thought fully articulate at least since Immanuel Kant. The relevance to geographic thought of these "neo-humanist" schools. Neo-humanism in geography seems to mean insurgent subjectivity, idealism, and even sentimentalism. In the name of phenomenology, existentialism, marxism, and even a refashioned idealism, not to mention a resurgent transcendentalism, geographers, like their counterparts in other sciences, have been drawn into a vast intellectual debate over the goals both of the age of analysis and of understanding itself.
