Existentialism, part 2

So, I was on vacation in PA last week, but on the way to the airport I listened to more of that CD set on Existentialism. I had to shut it off at some point. Not because I was at the airport, but because of the outrageous claims made on the CD!

"How do we know that we are not alone in the world and the rest of the people are just robots or our imagination?" was the topic that caused the shutting off of the CD player. He claimed that Sartre had a solution to this question. I was intrigued and moved closer to the CD player, even though the sound was coming out of all of the speakers around me, and that one shouldn't really move towards a CD player while tooling down the highway at 65 mph in traffic. The proof, he claimed that Sartre said, was that we react to people as if they were real. That was it. If people weren't real, thinking beings we would react to them as we do trees. Wow... I was blown away. This was the pinnacle of Existentialist philosophy that I dedicated twelve hours of my life listening to CDs to get to? Wow.

There are so many things wrong with that statement by the speaker that claimed he was stating something Sartre said that I just had to turn off the CD player. Sure, there had been so many things in the past that caused me to turn it off as well, but this time, I also took all of the CDs out of the changer and packed them away forever. Other claims of "The object isn't the word, but these are scissors" and "There might be an objective level to the world, but Existentialism says that there isn't, the words are the reality" were definitely temporary show stoppers, but this one...

Well, I'll leave you to ponder the problems with this one for now. I'm late for dinner. ;) I will post my understanding of the statement and my view of some of its problems in part 3.

The Edward