The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

Description

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.

Steven Crowell is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Rice University. He is the author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001) and the editor of The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson (1995) and, with Jeff Malpas, of Transcendental Heidegger (2001). He currently edits the journal Husserl Studies.

'This volume will be most useful to students for the overview chapters, and for the substantial amount of discussion of Sartre's ideas and political activities.' Michel Petheram, Reference Reviews