[Due to technical issues with Typepad yesterday, I am running this for another day.--ES]
Analytical Existentialism is the use of an analytical style to investigate topics that matter to us as human beings capable of feelings and anxieties or joys while doing justice to our first-personal (even phenomological) perspective on these topics (recall this post on Laurie Paul; and this post on Ruth Chang). While Laurie Paul's work has revealed the potential and thrill of analytical existentialism in our times, I was introduced to analytical existentialism around 1991 or 1992 by Jeff McConnell, an instructor at Tufts. If you get a BA from Harvard, a PhD from MIT, and teach at Tufts you are not exactly obscure, but Jeff has published little (this is the only article I am familiar with). I took 'intro to philosophy' and 'existentialism' with Jeff. The 'intro to philosophy' course included Plato's Meno, Descartes's Meditations, Kant's Prolegomena (I think), and a lot of readings from Ammerman's Classics of Analytical Philosophy volume. (We may have also read from the Rorty volume.) In the course on 'existentialism' we read Kierkegaard and Heidegger and such figures, as well as some readings from analytical authors (e.g., Munitz, Nagel, etc.) on topics like 'death,' but the course was really an excuse for Jeff to try out ways to develop the most precise and rigorous was of asking the question 'why do I exist,' (as asked from the first person-perspective).
I learned that Jeff was working on a manuscript on the topic -- why do I exist? -- by accident; once, I was accompanying John Rawls to his car in the company of Jeff after a key-note that Rawls had given at Tufts. We got lost in the College-Avenue car-park looking for Rawls' car. It was a grey and drizzly day, and I was burning to ask Rawls some questions. (The key one for me was how Rawls would answer the Nietzschean that claimed all value is will to power.) But by the time we had found the car, we were running late for dinner, and all three of us were a mixture of embarrassed, hungry, tired, and contemplative. As we were driving on Mass Ave, Rawls turned to Jeff. (They were both sitting in the front seats, so I was straining to lean forward.) 'Are you still working on why you exist?' 'Yes, Jack," Jeff said, and he added something about how he had made progress on his manuscript. I wouldn't say that Rawls snickered, but I had the distinct impression he chuckled. Quite possibly, it was a warm and generous laugh, but the conversation seems to have ended there (in my memory--for all I know Jeff said a lot more).
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