The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

These essays demonstrate the contemporary vitality of existential thought, engaging critically with the main concepts and figures of existentialism.

This is the first volume of original essays to be devoted exclusively to existentialism in over forty years. It includes in-depth accounts of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir and chapters on the influence of existentialism in literature, religion, politics and psychiatry.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.