existentialadj.

1656 P. K. Surfeit to A B C 33 The third universal is appetite; every perfect and imperfect living creature acquires sustenance to eate and drink. For existential or sensual, I grant many, that there is a Sun that shineth, that the fire heateth, &c. yet a blind man and the Paralytick denies both.

1693 tr. Bp. T. Barlow Exercit. i, in Genuine Remains 483 Enjoying the good of existence..and..the being deprived of that existential good [L. illo essentiae bono].

1729 C. Place Ess. Vindic. Visible Creation 4 Whatever Perfections we add to Beings, of Beauty, Order, Integrity &c. whatever essential or existential Eminencies..we endue them withal..there is no Advantage nor Emolument at all results to the Existents themselves.

1818 S. T. Coleridge Friend III. 96 (note) The essential cause of fiendish guilt, when it makes itself existential and peripheric.

1832 Christian Examiner & Gen. Rev. Mar. 100 Existential, therefore, would signify—having existence;..—essentially associated with existence;—partaking of the nature of existence;..—resembling existence &c.

1878 S. H. Hodgson Philos. of Refl. II. iii. vii. §1. 12 There is a certain parallelism between the logical and existential analyses.

1883 E. J. Hamilton Human Mind ¶49, 123 The supposition that both our knowing that a thing is, and that existential knowledge, which is immediately derived from it, assert actual existence.

1923 G. Santayana Scepticism & Animal Faith (1929) x. 91 All these current distinctions..are borrowed from various ulterior existential relations subsisting between facts, some mental and some material.

1977 Synthese 26 431 When we see the table before us, we experience its existence as an unmistakable existential perception. When a mathematician is talking about the existence of a certain number, he does not have the same existential acquaintance with the number.

2014 D. Mayerson On Path to Genocide iii. vii. 193 The role of the dominant power in the characterization of the outgroup as an existential threat is crucial.

1797 tr. J. S. Beck Princ. Crit. Philos. i. iv. 163 The existential position [Ger. Existentialsatz]: I am, is..but empirical, as it expresses the: I think, I am, taken from every empirical representation.

1819 S. T. Coleridge Philos. Lect. (expanded from shorthand transcript) (1949) ix. 276 This necessarily led men..to doubt whether a logical truth was necessarily an existencial one, i.e. whether because a thing was logically consistent it must be necessarily existent.

a1856 W. Hamilton Lect. Metaphysics (1860) III. xiii. 229 Existential propositions, that is, those in which mere existence is predicated.

1888 J. Venn in Mind July 415 Convention does not allow us to say ‘It executes’..But we can just as conveniently adopt the existential form, ‘There was an execution’.

1900 G. E. Moore in Mind 9 292 The distinction between necessary and existential truths.

1939 Mind 48 529 In them [sc. propositions], whether they are existential or non-existential, conceptualisation (and with it symbolisation) are altogether essential.

1966 Math. Rev. 31 41 Since the main results are existential, a really conclusive solution requires a narrow meaning of ‘propositional calculus’.

2004 M. Potter Set Theory & its Philos. xiii. 217 The calculation which shows this, followed by an application of existential generalization, constitutes a proof in PA of the original sentence.

1873 C. Spence tr. H. Martensen Christian Ethics 225 Only the individual in his personal relation to God is the subject of his interest; and this existential pathos [Ger. dieses existentielle Pathos], which predominates the dialectic, is the guiding view-point for the voluminous authorship of Kierkegaard.

1915 Encycl. Relig. & Ethics VII. 697/1 His [sc. Kierkegaard's] thought..was in its nature ‘existential’, expressive of his whole personality.

a1937 M. Geiger in Philos. & Phenomenol. Res. (1943) 3 257 The distinguishing feature of all existential philosophy is the fact that its basic category is existential significance.

1940 H. Read Annals of Innocence ii. vii. 182 That philosophy is an existential one: it is the expression of all my faculties, of the whole consciousness of a living organism.

1952 S. S. Prawer German Lyric Poetry vii. 115 Sehnsucht nach dem Tode, the final, culminating poem of Novalis's ‘Hymnen an die Nacht’, communicates the experience of one who views the present..with existential Angst.

1956 C. Wilson Outsider ix. 273 Kierkegaard's attitude is so Existential that his Christianity is a religion that regards God as the intermediary between himself and his fellow human beings, and cannot even accept their existence without first accepting the existence of God.

1959 W. H. Sokel Writer in Extremis ii. viii. 223 The modernist aesthetics is closely linked to the social and existential crisis of the creative man which, at first apparent in Germany, spread in the course of the nineteenth century to the rest of Europe.

1962 R. G. Olson Introd. Existentialism iv. 129 Existential psychoanalysis, the method for discovering an individual's fundamental project of being.

1980 R. M. Polhemus Comic Faith (1982) viii. 249 It has seriously been argued..that Alice [in Alice in Wonderland] is an existential heroine.

1997 New Yorker 29 Sept. 86/2 A pretty girl in a literature seminar..earnestly identifies with Dostoyevsky because he is ‘existential’.

2014 P. Watson Age of Atheists I. iv. 98 Each [of certain plays by Strindberg] concerns existential revolt directed against the meaninglessness and contradictions of human existence.

1881 J. Venn Symbolic Logic vii. 154 Having thus cleared the ground in respect of the general existential import of our propositions, we are now in a position to complete the discussion..as to the best mode of expressing symbolically the familiar propositions of ordinary Logic.

1898 A. N. Whitehead Treat. Universal Algebra p. vii A conventional mathematical definition has no existential import.

1946 Mind 55 109 The Ethics [of Spinoza] is a prolonged effort to deduce truths of existential import out of a combination of definitions.

2009 Analysis 69 27 There is a natural distinction to be drawn between the principles that have existential import and the ones that don't.

1897 A. C. Armstrong tr. R. Falckenberg Hist. Mod. Philos. (new ed.) xi. 466 Even the system of identity was merely rational, i. e., negative, philosophy, to which there must be added..a positive or existential philosophy, which does not,..rise to the highest principle, to God, but starts from this supreme Idea and shows its actuality.]

a1937 M. Geiger in Philos. & Phenomenol. Res. (1943) 3 256 ‘Existential Philosophy’ is a collective term for many problems, many methods of thinking, many points of view.

1948 Rev. Metaphysics 1 84 The existential philosophy he [sc. St Thomas Aquinas] formulated was strikingly original, and filled with new implications.

2012 Time Out N.Y. 12 Jan. 36/3 15-year-old Tina Malhotra begins a diary addressed to Jean-Paul Sartre for an elective class in existential philosophy.

1933 Ann. Math. 34 385 The propositions and rules of Hilbert and Ackermann concerning the existential quantifier can be proved.

1951 J. Łukasiewicz Aristotle's Syllogistic iv. 84 I denote quantifiers by Greek capitals, the universal quantifier by Π, and the particular or existential quantifier by Σ.

1984 P. H. Winston Artific. Intelligence (ed. 2) vii. 210 The symbol ∃ is called the existential quantifier.

2007 D. Westerståhl in D. M. Gabbay & F. Guenthner Handbk. Philos. Logic (ed. 2) XIV. 229 The invention of predicate logic with the universal and existential quantifiers can also be attributed to Peano and Russell.