Albert Camus' Philosophy

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Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist and writer of philosophical essays. He was not a philosopher by profession; however through his many literary works he made important contributions to a wide range of philosophical issues. He was born on Nov 7, 1913 in small village called Mondovi in the northeast region of French Algeria. After his father’s world war one death, Camus lived with his partially deaf and mentally impaired mother and his brother in a three room apartment, enduring the conditions of a harsh poverty. Later in life he attended the University Of Algiers and majored in Philosophy, at age 25 he moved to France. @ Years before his death he received a Nobel Prize At no point in time did Camus ever subscribe to the title of a philosopher, regardless of the many people who referred to him so. While he also denied the label of being an existentialist, however he did show some existential views in his works. He developed a philosophy called Absurdism, which is kind of a branch off exististentialism. Many philosophers interpret the absurd differently, but Camus described the absurd as the product of our human tendency to search for a greater power or meaning and our inability to find anything, which no matter what man does he will be faced with “the silence of the universe”. He quotes “The absurd is not in man nor the world, but in their presence together. . . it is the only bond uniting them.” Camus realized humans were then faced with a predicament, what do we do, know that we are aware that there is no hope or greater being/meaning. Our first choice is blunt and simple: physical suicide. If we decide that a life without some essential purpose or meaning is not worth living, we can simply choose to kill ourselves. Camus rejects this choice as cowardly and evasive. Choice two is the religious solution of imagining a
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