Book cover of At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

Book description

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by the New York Times, a spirited account of a major intellectual movement of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it, by the best-selling author of How to Live and Humanly Possible Sarah Bakewell.

Paris, 1933:…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked At the Existentialist Cafe as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The author does a marvelous job of giving even the beginner a way into the phenomenological movement in general and the existentialist development of phenomenology in particular.

At the Existentialist Café introduced me to Sarah Bakewell. The text represents an overview of the philosophical work conducted by Jean-Paul Sartre and his polyamorous partner, Simone de Beauvoir, along with many other philosophers.

The writings of Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others are critically evaluated by Bakewell in this capacious romp through the world of modern philosophy. If you seek an overview of philosophical writing with implications for your own life, this is the book for you.

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