(a) What do the existentialist thinkers mean by the slogan "existence precedes essence" ? How is human existence related to human…

(a) "Existence precedes essence" and human freedom

Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim (in the 1946 lecture 'Existentialism is a Humanism') "existence precedes essence" radically overturns traditional metaphysical essentialism, which held that human nature is predefined by a creator or a fixed teleological form. For a manufactured object such as a paper-knife, the idea or purpose (essence) comes before the object exists; Sartre denies that this is true of human beings, since there is no God to conceive human nature in advance. For existentialists, human beings first exist, encounter themselves in the world, and only through subsequent choices, actions, and projects define who they become. While Martin Heidegger emphasizes "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) and Sartre underscores *facticity*—the concrete, unchosen socio-historical constraints of one's birth—these conditions do not determine human essence. Instead, they constitute the situated horizon against which self-creation occurs.

Consequently, freedom is not merely an attribute that humans possess; it is the ontological structure of human reality itself (being-for-itself). As Sartre famously declared, "Man is condemned to be free." Because human existence lacks an inherent blueprint, individuals bear total responsibility for their lives. Evading this terrifying burden of radical freedom results in "bad faith" (mauvaise foi)—the inauthentic adoption of deterministic roles or external dogma. Authentic existence requires confronting existential angst, acknowledging one's non-fixity, and forging meaning through committed, self-directed action.

(b) Husserl: essences and the continuity of consciousness and being

Edmund Husserl bridges the traditional Cartesian dualism between the subjective mind and objective reality by demonstrating that essences (eidos) exhibit an intrinsic continuity between consciousness and being. Through the phenomenological reduction (epoché), which brackets the "natural attitude" and assumptions about the independent existence of the external world, consciousness is revealed as essentially intentional: consciousness is always "consciousness-of" something.

Through eidetic reduction, using free imaginative variation to find what cannot be varied without the object ceasing to be what it is, and through the intuition of essences (Wesensschau), Husserl demonstrates that essences are neither mind-independent Platonic forms nor mere subjective psychological impressions. Instead, they are the invariant, constitutive structures of phenomena realized in the intentional correlation between noesis (the act of consciousness) and noema (the objective meaning experienced). Because an object can only show itself through these invariant structural possibilities of experience, essence serves as the necessary medium through which consciousness and being are harmoniously joined, eliminating the gulf between the experiencing subject and the phenomenon known. Critics such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty argued that this leads towards transcendental idealism, and that being and embodiment exceed what pure consciousness constitutes.

(c) The two dogmas in Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951)

In Two Dogmas of Empiricism, W.V.O. Quine challenges logical positivism by dismantling two deeply entrenched assumptions:

The first dogma is the analytic-synthetic distinction—the belief in a fundamental cleavage between truths grounded solely in meaning (analytic, like "no bachelor is married") and truths grounded in empirical fact (synthetic). Quine argues that attempts to define analyticity rely on a circular network of inter-definable notions such as synonymy, definition, necessity, interchangeability salva veritate and semantic rules, each of which can be explained only by appeal to another member of the circle, so analyticity is never independently clarified.

The second dogma is reductionism—the view that every meaningful empirical statement can be translated into statements about immediate experience (the radical form attempted in Carnap's Aufbau), or, more subtly, that each statement taken in isolation has its own range of confirming and disconfirming experiences. Quine holds the two dogmas to be at root identical.

In place of these dogmas, Quine proposes confirmation holism: our knowledge constitutes a dynamic "web of belief" that faces the tribunal of experience as an integrated whole, rather than sentence by sentence. In the paper's own image, our beliefs form a man-made fabric that touches experience only along the edges. Any statement at the periphery can be revised, and even logical truths at the core are not entirely immune to empirical recalibration. Consequently, Quine dissolves the rigid boundary between speculative philosophy and empirical science, a line he later developed into 'epistemology naturalized' (1969).