The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

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.