The Existentialist Reader

"This book is edited by Paul S. MacDonald, and it’s an anthology of texts. Some are by fairly familiar authors — Sartre is in there, so is Camus. But he also includes key works by writers who are less the celebrity names, but who are very much worth reading and provide different directions to explore. Among the people he includes are Gabriel Marcel, who is a Christian existentialist philosopher, and who is very interesting. He writes about the mystery that is at the heart of existence, the fact that we’ll never completely understand what existence is, and about the fact of being embodied, of our connection to other people, which he views as crucial. “That view of existentialism as ‘Life is terrible and we just have to resign ourselves to it’ is a real misrepresentation.” There is also a selection in there by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, again a fascinating figure. Simone de Beauvoir is mainly remembered for her memoirs, her novels, and her feminist work – but there’s a piece in the book about ambiguity from her which is fascinating. So the idea of including this book is that it provides lots of pointers, lots of lines you might follow if you want to explore less-well-known parts of existentialism. Karl Jaspers is another one. He was one of the first to write about “ Existenzphilosophie. ” He wrote about communication, about how we make sense of the situations we’re in, about other people, about politics and all sorts of things. So this is just a fantastic compilation of existentialist arrows that you might want to follow into different thinkers."