Existentialism

[Neo-Scholastic]

IMHO what distinguishes existentialism from both classical and analytic philosophies, is that it takes the personal existent as given and then proceeds to inquire about the stances available to a personal existent given his or her condition.

That's absolutely true. For all its Cartesian rhetoric, existentialism poses a radical critique to Western metaphysics by knocking ontology off its pedestal and asserting that the human experience is the starting point of all talk about how reality is. As Sartre says, "The essence is not in the object, it is in the meaning of the object."

However, that inability to econcile meaning and existence is the central failure of existentialism IMO. They cover for it by embracing either absurdism, like Camus, or mysticism, like Martain Buber. In contrast to this, I maintain that certain knowlege of trancendant principles, such as the Principle of Non-Contradiction, are entailed in one's own existence-as-such and as such significantly relate the first-person apprehension of being with Being-In-Itself.