At the Existentialist Café

This is a history of existentialism (and phenomenology) told through the lives of the movement's major figures. Loosely centred on Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir in Paris and Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, we are taken on crisscrossing tale of people and ideas.

The book follows a largely biographical narrative that is interspersed with explanations of the philosophy. Blackwell does a very good job of explaining this in a way that is understandable to the general reader. Considering how obtuse some of the primary texts are this is quite impressive, it is not easy to give a clear presentation of Heidegger.

The philosophy alone would mean that this is a good primer on existentialism, but this also offers an engaging story about the lives of the people who wrote it. They lived during interesting times and lead flawed and colourful lives. Sartre with his support of morally questionable communist regimes and Heidegger with his Nazi sympathies show us “that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are.”