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

Twentieth-century philosophy witnessed a profound re-examination of foundational categories, progressing from existential investigations of lived subjectivity to phenomenological structures of consciousness and analytic critiques of empirical dogma.

Existence, Essence, and Human Freedom

Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim "existence precedes essence" radically overturns traditional metaphysical essentialism, which held that human nature is predefined by a creator or a fixed teleological form. 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.

Husserl: Essences as Continuity between 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 and 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.

Quine’s Critique of the Two Dogmas

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, necessity, and definition, none of which can be empirically verified without presupposing analyticity itself.

The second dogma is reductionism—the view that every meaningful empirical statement can be translated into an equivalent construct of immediate sensory experiences.

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. Due to the underdetermination of theory by evidence and the indeterminacy of translation, 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, advocating for an epistemology naturalized within scientific inquiry.

Together, these traditions reconfigured modern philosophy: existentialism situated freedom as the inescapable ground of human existence, phenomenology illuminated the intentional structures binding consciousness to the world, and Quinean holism dismantled foundationalism to integrate epistemology with natural inquiry.