I listened to two Great Courses lecture series on existentialism, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life by Robert C. Solomon and Existentialism and the Authentic Life by Skye C. Cleary.
No Excuses had a lot of lectures devoted to fictional works, more than I expected from a philosophy course. The title comes from Sartre’s idea of Absolute Freedom, that even chained in a dungeon you’re still free to choose your own interpretation of the facts and how you react to them. The Bad Faith concept stuck with me too, the idea that you’re acting in bad faith any time your aspirations ignore the actual facts of your situation. I could aspire to be a champion basketball player, but the facts say I’m 5'11" and almost 50, so aspiring to that would be bad faith.
Existentialism and the Authentic Life covered a wide variety of existentialist authors I hadn’t heard of before, along with the generally expected ones. My favorite was already Camus, since I’ve read some of his works before, and his idea of the Absurd, the tension between wanting the universe to have inherent meaning and it flatly refusing to provide any. I’ll admit my own notes on it were thin though, since I was working out at the time, so I ended up going to Gemini afterward to help me reconstruct the Myth of Sisyphus material properly.
Heidegger and Ortega were both phenomenologists that liked to make up words, which is about the most accurate one-line summary I can give either of them. When the lecture asked me to fill in the blank on “I am ___,” I immediately reached for “Senior Software Engineer,” which was exactly the trap Sartre was pointing at: you’re always more than your vocation, no matter how many labels you stack up.
Full book notes for No Excuses and Existentialism and the Authentic Life.