#moral-psychology

⇄ ‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it

I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…