The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

by Edited by Steven Crowell

• ISBN13: 9780521732789
• ISBN10: 0521732786
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-03-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Existentialism exerts a continuing fascination on students of philosophy and general readers. As a philosophical phenomenon, though, it is often poorly understood, as a form of radical subjectivism that turns its back on reason and argumentation and possesses all the liabilities of philosophical idealism but without any idealistic conceptual clarity. In this volume of original essays, the first to be devoted exclusively to existentialism in over forty years, a team of distinguished commentators discuss the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir and show how their focus on existence provides a compelling perspective on contemporary issues in moral psychology and philosophy of mind, language and history. A further sequence of chapters examines the influence of existential ideas beyond philosophy, in literature, religion, politics and psychiatry. The volume offers a rich and comprehensive assessment of the continuing vitality of existentialism as a philosophical movement and a cultural phenomenon.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Introduction

Existentialism and its legacy

Existentialism in Historical Perspective

Existentialism as a philosophical movement

Existentialism as a cultural movement

Major Existentialist Philosophers

Kierkegaard's single individual and the point of indirect communication

'What a monster then is man': Pascal and Kierkegaard on being a contradictory self and what to do about it

Nietzsche: after the death of God

Nietzsche: selfhood, creativity, and philosophy

Heidegger: the existential analytic of Dasein

The antinomy of being: Heidegger's critique of humanism

Sartre's existentialism and the nature of consciousness

Political existentialism: the career of Sartre's political thought

Simone de Beauvoir's existentialism: freedom and ambiguity in the human world

Merleau-Ponty on body, flesh, and visibility

The Reach of Existential Philosophy

Existentialism as literature

Existentialism and religion

Racism is a system: how existentialism became dialectical in Fanon and Sartre

Existential phenomenology, psychiatric illness, and the death of possibilities

Bibliography of works cited

Index

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