At The Existentialist Café: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus and the Lives and Ideas of Existentialism
About this ebook
Paris, 1932. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Aron sit over apricot cocktails as Aron describes a new philosophy that starts not with abstract systems but with lived experience.
From that scene, Sarah Bakewell opens out the story of existentialism and phenomenology across twentieth-century Europe. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus and Merleau-Ponty become thinkers whose ideas about freedom, authenticity, responsibility and embodiment were inseparable from the lives they led.
Those ideas are tested by Nazism, occupation and resistance, feminism, Communism, anti-colonial politics and bitter intellectual friendships. Bakewell explains difficult philosophy through biography and historical drama, showing how arguments that began in cafés and lecture halls became questions of public action and moral responsibility.
For readers curious about existentialism but wary of philosophical jargon, At the Existentialist Café makes the ideas lucid without making them simple. It is a history of people trying to work out how to live freely in a century that repeatedly put freedom under pressure.
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About the author
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the "hippie trail" through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex, and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include How to Live: a life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Prize, and At the Existentialist Café, a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. She was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She still has a tendency to wander, but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.
www.sarahbakewell.com
