At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.76 (523 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1590514882 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 448 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-02-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists’ story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anticolonialism, feminism, and gay rights. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism. From the best-selling author of How to Live, a spirited account of one of the twentieth century’s major intellectual movements and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters—fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships—and a vital
. In addition to writing, she now teaches in the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London. Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book C
Its audacious title was How to Live, and her new book deserves to be read as a further study in the same enlivening theme.”--The New York Times Book Review“At the Existentialist Café is a bracingly fresh look at once-antiquated ideas and the milieu in which they flourished. Bakewell demonstrated her ability to plumb big ideas for real-life relevance in How to Live, her 2010 biography of Michel de Montaigne…She brings the same lively intelligence to her latest work. Some of her characters, notably Merleau-Ponty, were immune to the temptations that came with the status of European professorship. How to live?
Angie Boyter said Weaving history, biography, and philosophy. In the opening scene of At the Existentialist Café, philosopher Raymond Aron says to his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, “If you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it”. After reading this book, I say, “If you are Sarah Bakewell, you can take existentialism and make sense out of it.”The existentialist themes of freedom, political activism, and “authentic being” became watchwords of the middle and late "Weaving history, biography, and philosophy" according to Angie Boyter. In the opening scene of At the Existentialist Café, philosopher Raymond Aron says to his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, “If you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it”. After reading this book, I say, “If you are Sarah Bakewell, you can take existentialism and make sense out of it.”The existentialist themes of freedom, political activism, and “authentic being” became watchwords of the middle and late 20th century. When I first encountered existentialist writing, I was simultaneously en. 0th century. When I first encountered existentialist writing, I was simultaneously en. An entertaining but glib reading of an important period in Continental philosophy Drew Odom Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café is, like its title, entertaining and glib. It consists largely of anecdotes about and shallow intellectual histories of its major figures. Her heroes are Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, roughly in that order. Her summaries of the various philosophical positions rarely dig any deeper than the familiar commonplaces of each of them: Hussar's epoché, Sartre's existence precedes essence, Heidegger's investigations into Dasein and Being-in-the-World, for example. This is in no way a probing book. It could prove. Magnificently crafted; an absolute treasure It is well known that technology has reached the point where we are often better known by the almighty computer than we know ourselves. Although my Amazon Vine queue sometimes mystifies me (WHY as a 76-year-old woman whose youngest grandchild is in high school am I continuously being offered baby products?), it turns out that Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is a tremendous gift to my reading experience. It didn’t take me long to realize why I was offered this book, despite my previous total lack of involvement with any for