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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
existential
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ an existential novel
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ For Rosenberg, faced with the realities of the world, the canvas would become the site of an existential encounter.
▪ Suppose we begin with an existential hypothesis, without being able to point to any confirming evidence.
▪ The epistemological version involves an assumption that all significant existential claims can be translated into claims about potential knowledge.
▪ The same theory may take on quite different political, moral and even existential meanings according to particular circumstances of context and conjuncture.
▪ There is no need to deny the importance of existential affirmation as the locus of meaning in individual cases.
▪ We were definitely going for the existential crime-drama thing.
▪ William did not go West on an existential errand; the end of his journey was known.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Existential

Existential \Ex`is*ten"tial\, a.

  1. Having existence. [Archaic]
    --Bp. Barlow.

  2. of or pertaining to, or having the character of, existentialism.

  3. (Logic) specifying actual existence, rather than only possibility; as, the existential operator.

    Existentially as well as essentially intelligent.
    --Colerige.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
existential

1690s, "pertaining to existence," from Late Latin existentialis/exsistentialis, from existentia/exsistentia (see existence). As a term in logic, from 1819; in philosophy, from 1937, tracing back to the Danish works of Kierkegaard (see existentialism). Related: Existentially.

Wiktionary
existential

a. 1 Of, or relating to existence. 2 Based on experience; empirical. 3 (context philosophy English) Of, or relating to existentialism. 4 (context linguistics English) Relating to part of a clause that indicates existence, e.g. "there is".

WordNet
existential
  1. adj. derived from experience or the experience of existence; "the rich experiential content of the teachings of the older philosophers"- Benjamin Farrington; "formal logicians are not concerned with existential matters"- John Dewey [syn: experiential]

  2. of or as conceived by existentialism; "an existential moment of choice"

  3. relating to or dealing with existence (especially with human existence)

Wikipedia

Usage examples of "existential".

Beneath that as an evocation of existential loneliness, a Christian fable, a parable of the artist.

The existential nocturnal glare of bathrooms has a certain ghastliness built into the shadowless illumination.

Other as an unsettling structure of ontology are presented in the context of an anti-empirical, existential psychoanalytic.

Ironic that this amplitude of class should be accompanied by such grim individual funneling of effort, convergence toward an existential center.

Existential and Rankian positions that the fear of death is the mainspring of human motivation and that man needs to belong to a system of ideas in which mystery exists.

Last time, though, there was another subroutine which went on and on about death being the one great mystery, the primal source of existential angst.

Jack is drawn toward occasions of existential self-fashioning, heroic moments of vision in a commodified world.

The double inclusion of his donjuanesque questioning of time, which is both a principle of writing and a thematic goal, creates a fascinating synthesis of the novel where, as we have seen many times, the esthetic, ethical, erotic and historical functions combine in a single existential flow.

No sense of existential bss, no postmodern grief for the death of the American value system, not even the religio-psychological guilt of Western man.

How, with such existential occupations, could the two of them find time to think of a baby that suffused Tulla Pokriefke with sweetness though it did not yet round out her expressly tailored coat?

Men and women, caught in the subject/object duality, are thus alienated from Source and Summitand thus alienated from the Alland it is only in overcoming duality and existential alienation that men and women can find genuine happiness.

It was, in Audrey's view, a strange and almost existential fastidiousness in such a relentlessly cruel creature.

Cairns knew that if he dwelt on the strangeness of the sight, the feeling of unreality could make him physically nauseous: la nausée, Sartre's old existential insecurity -- Cairns wondered, not for the first time, how the philosopher would have coped with a situation as metaphysically disturbing as this.

These two worlds are differently conceptualised and differently evaluated, and though we live simultaneously in both we can no more force our experience into a repressive existential straitjacket which recognizes only one form of perception than we can separate ourselves into two distinct individuals.

Nash found a plastic mug, stenciled with the Buck Existential cartoon characters, which looked reasonably clean.