This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Trans-disciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual's imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it.

Huon Wardle is an Anthropologist at the University of St Andrews. Author of An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (2000), he focuses on the Caribbean, Kant's Anthropology, and on cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical phenomena. Volumes include (with Moises Lino e Silva) Freedom in Practice (2017), (with Justin Shaffner) Cosmopolitics (2017), and (with Nigel Rapport) An Anthropology of the Enlightenment (2018). His essay, "The Artist Carl Abrahams and the Cosmopolitan Work of Centring and Peripheralizing the Self" won the Royal Anthropological Institute's J. B. Donne Prize in 2014. With Paloma Gay y Blasco, he recently revised How to Read Ethnography (2019).

Nigel Rapport, MA (Cambridge) PhD (Manchester), is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). His research interests cover social theory, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books include: Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012); Distortion and Love: An anthropological reading of the life and art of Stanley Spencer (2016); and Cosmopolitan Love: Ethical engagement beyond culture (2019).

Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre, researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He has widely written about epistemology and methodology of anthropology. He claims a human-centered anthropology. His main books in French are Ethnographie de l'action (1996 and 2020), Le fait religieux (2005), Anthropologie existentiale (2009), Contre le relationnisme (2014), Le volume humain. Esquisse d'une science de l'homme (2017) and Anthropologie existentiale, autographie et entité humaine (2022). His books in English are Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology (2015), Separate Humans. Anthropology, Ontology, Existence (2016), Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being (2019). He has co-edited with Michael Jackson What is Existential Anthropology? (2015).

1. General Introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science

Section 1. The Existential Perspective Across the Disciplines

2. Introduction to Section 1. The Existential Perspective Across the Disciplines

3. Existential Sociology

4. Existential Psychology

5. Anthropology as an Existential Inquiry

6. Existential Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

7. Existentiality and Semiotics - are they compatible?

8. Kant and the Principles of Existentialism

Section 2. Interiority, Selfhood and Integrity: The Individual as regards the Social

9. Introduction to Section 2. Interiority, Selfhood and Integrity: The Individual as regards the Social

10. Unsociable Sociability

11. Internal Conversation: Interiority and Individuality

12. Relational, but also Singular: On the Varieties and Particularities of Selfscapes

13. The Ballad (or Fugue) of William Cullum: Disciplining the Body of Prisoner 55552-052

14. The Car Driver's Being: A Different Direction to the Auto-Ontological Turn

15. Existentialism and Tango Social Dance: The Anthropology of (Moving) Events

Section 3. Intersubjectivity: Care for and Faith in the Other

16. Introduction to Section 3. Intersubjectivity: Care for and Faith in the Other

17. Existential Care Ethics

18. Faith and the Existential

19. Existence Against Being

20. (In)Dividual Lives and Existential Narratives

21. Existential Finitude in Indian Buddhist Philosophy

22. Exploring the Relationship Between Language and Empathy: Some Unexpected Connections

Section 4. Human Singularity and Continuity

23. Introduction to Section 4. Human Singularity and Continuity

24. The Loss of Singular Existence and Personal Experience: The Problem of Interchangeability in the Social Sciences

25. Sartrean Existentialism and Existential Art

26. Volumology as Existential Anthropology

27. An Empirical Approach to Studying Human Existence

28. Filming and Describing an Individual