Understanding Existentialism

The book begins with a discussion of the movement¿s antecedents in the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers and Marcel before examining the coretexts that give existentialism its philosophical foundations: Heidegger¿s Being and Time, Sartre¿s Being and Nothingness, Merleau- Ponty¿s Phenomenology of Perception and de Beauvoir¿s The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex. The final chapter assesses the legacy of existentialist ideas, particularly their influence on poststructuralism, and argues that existentialism remains a productive school of thought.