
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher. He become known as a great existentialist thinker alongside his lifelong friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir.
“Sartre famously believed in what he called ‘radical freedom’, which is the view that none of your character traits or values or projects, no part of your outlook carries any weight or inertia of its own: it’s only there because you continue to endorse and underwrite it, and you can just change that.” Jonathan Webber discussing classic books dealing with existentialist themes.
Tête-á-Tête is a dual biography that focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, exploring the practical application of their philosophy.
Books by Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre & Sarah Richmond (translator)
***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***
“This is a book that was published during the Second World War in occupied Paris by Sartre, who has since become known as a great existentialist thinker alongside his lifelong friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir. Being and Nothingness became the Bible of existentialism…Although this book is threateningly abstract in places, it’s also fundamentally practical. It’s about the nature of what it is to be human…For me personally, I became interested in studying philosophy because I wanted to try and understand some of Being and Nothingness and Sartre’s ideas…You’d be surprised how many philosophers have been inspired by Sartre, even though they’ve gone on to become very different sorts of philosophers from him.” Read more...
The Best Philosophy Books of 2018
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“It is a reference to the third century martyr Saint Genestus, the patron saint of actors, who is known in French as Genêt…Sartre is drawing parallels between the life of Genet and the mythology surrounding this saint…I have to admit this is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. It’s a biography…of Genet, who was quite famous at the time as a novelist, a playwright, and a poet. But he wasn’t hugely famous. Sartre had been asked to write a preface to a collected works of Genet, and what he ended up writing was a 700-page psychoanalytic tome.” Read more...
Underrated Existentialist Classics
Jonathan Webber, Philosopher
“It’s a very accessible, easy-to-read, non-technical, public lecture…The reason I wanted to include it is that in contemporary Britain, atheists and humanist organisations are keen to stress the cheerful side of atheism…What you see in Sartre represents that tradition in thought pointing to troubling aspects of accepting a world without God. There are difficulties involved. Primarily, it’s this issue around responsibility. Without God, there’s nothing to fall back on as an authority, nothing to tell us what the right way to live is, or what the correct moral code is, nothing to show us what makes life meaningful. We really do have to make that decision for ourselves.” Read more...
Julian Baggini, Philosopher
“The Words is a memoir of Sartre’s childhood. It takes him up to the age of 10, and it is a brilliant piece of self-analysis.” Read more...
Eva Hoffman recommends the best Memoirs
Eva Hoffman, Memoirist
“I chose Nausea for several reasons. One is that it’s the first existentialist book that I ever read. It’s what first made me curious to learn more, and that’s exactly what the book does. It’s readable, it’s powerful, it’s sometimes a bit ridiculous, but it’s intense. Although it is a novel, it’s a novelization of philosophical ideas, so you approach the philosophy through one literary character’s individual crisis and you approach that crisis through a sequence of ideas. It’s the story of a man called Roquentin, who undergoes a kind of philosophical nervous breakdown while he’s trying to write a biography of an 18th century character, the Marquis de Rollebon. He tries to narrate a coherent story about that life, but instead Roquentin finds himself overwhelmed by things. The sheer physical being of the world around him causes a kind of nauseous horror and this crisis leads him to think about what are, in fact, all sorts of existentialist questions: what it is to be free, what it is to be human, what is to be able to look at other people and be looked at by other people, to be in time, to be in history, to try and impose some kind of sense or narrative on the raw facts of existence.” Read more...
The best books on Existentialism
Sarah Bakewell, Philosopher
Interviews where books by Jean-Paul Sartre were recommended
The best books on Existentialism, recommended by Sarah Bakewell
Existentialist philosophy isn’t about bringing despair and angst into our lives, it’s about discovering our inner freedom, explains Sarah Bakewell, the author of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. She recommends books to learn more about existentialism.
The best books on Mental Illness, recommended by Samantha Harvey
The author discusses books on mental illness, explaining the conditions that keep us sane and the effects of removing them. Recommendations include Sartre, Coetzee, and John Bayley on Iris Murdoch
Eva Hoffman recommends the best Memoirs
To tell your own story is to confront and construct your deepest sense of self. The author of Lost in Translation tells us about five striking memoirs of identity, dislocation, and belonging.
The best books on France in the 1960s, recommended by Richard Wolin
The author and historian Richard Wolin explains that French people in the late 1960s were desperate for a utopian political alternative.
The best books on Atheism, recommended by Julian Baggini
Which are the best books on atheism? The British philosopher Julian Baggini, author of Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, chooses his top five.
Underrated Existentialist Classics, recommended by Jonathan Webber
As questions of identity become a focus of political debate, interest in existentialism has been booming once more. Here, the philosopher Jonathan Webber discusses five classic books dealing with existentialist themes that deserve a bigger audience.
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1
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
by Kate Manne -
2
Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life
by Edith Hall -
3
I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche
by Sue Prideaux -
4
Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are
by John Kaag -
5
Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre & Sarah Richmond (translator)
The Best Philosophy Books of 2018, recommended by Nigel Warburton
The Best Philosophy Books of 2018, recommended by Nigel Warburton
What can Nietzsche and Aristotle teach us about how to live? Should everyone read Being and Nothingness? From a philosophical approach to misogyny to an interrogation of whether it’s morally acceptable to have a Facebook account, philosopher Nigel Warburton introduces us to the best philosophy books of 2018.