Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is the philosopher whose work – certainly in the English-speaking world – came largely to define the existentialist movement in the 20th century. The image of the ...

In Plato’s Symposium, a character called Aristophanes gives an account of love. He tells us that human beings originally had doubled bodies, with two heads, four arms and four legs. As a punishment ...

Early in her new book, “At the Existentialist Café,” Sarah Bakewell admits that her beloved existentialism has seen better days. Once the preferred method for making sense of a godless world of moral ...

The aftermath of World War II spawned no identifiable Lost Generation, but it did bring a word for intellectuals to play with: existentialism. At first it appeared to be nothing but a new French ...

At the Existentialist Café takes us from the birth of existentialism to the deaths of its originators, exploring the lives of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and ...

Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir to Heidegger and Pascal. The thread running through all these appeals to ...

When it comes to living, there’s no getting out alive. But books can help us survive, so to speak, by passing on what is most important about being human before we perish. In “The Existentialist’s ...