Jean-Paul Sartre

“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...

The best books on Atheism

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