Existentialism
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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information The Cambridge Companion to EXISTENTIALISM Existentialism exerts a continuing fascination on students of philosophy and general readers. As a philosophical phe- nomenon, though, it is often poorly understood as a form of radical subjectivism that turns its back on reason and argu- mentation and possesses all the liabilities of philosophical idealism but without any idealistic conceptual clarity. In this volume of original essays, the first to be devoted exclu- sively to existentialism in over forty years, a team of distin- guished commentators discusses the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir and shows how their focus on existence provides a compel- ling perspective on contemporary issues in moral psychology and philosophy of mind, language, and history. A further sequence of chapters examines the influence of existential ideas beyond philosophy, in literature, religion, politics, and psychiatry. The volume offers a rich and comprehensive assessment of the continuing vitality of existentialism as a philosophical movement and a cultural phenomenon. steven crowell is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor at Rice University. He is the author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001), and the edi- tor of The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson (1995), and, with Jeff Malpas, of Transcendental Heidegger (2007). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES OF CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS ABELARD Edited by JEFFREY E. BROWER and KEVIN GUILFOY ADORNO Edited by THOMAS HUHN ANCIENT SCEPTICISM Edited by RICHARD BETT ANSELM Edited by BRIAN DAVIES and BRIAN LEFTOW AQUINAS Edited by NORMAN KRETZMANN and ELEONORE STUMP ARABIC PHILOSOPHY Edited by PETER ADAMSON and RICHARD C. TAYLOR HANNAH ARENDT Edited by DANA VILLA ARISTOTLE Edited by JONATHAN BARNES ATHEISM Edited by MICHAEL MARTIN AUGUSTINE Edited by ELEONORE STUMP and NORMAN KRETZMANN BACON Edited by MARKKU PELTONEN BERKELEY Edited by KENNETH P. WINKLER BOETHIUS Edited by JOHN MARENBOM BRENTANO Edited by DALE JACQUETTE CARNAP Edited by MICHAEL FRIEDMAN CONSTANT Edited by HELENA ROSENBLATT CRITICAL THEORY Edited by FRED RUSH DARWIN 2nd edition Edited by JONATHAN HODGE and GREGORY RADICK SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Edited by CLAUDIA CARD DESCARTES Edited by JOHN COTTINGHAM DEWEY Edited by MOLLY COCHRAN DUNS SCOTUS Edited by THOMAS WILLIAMS EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY Edited by A. A. LONG EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY Edited by DONALD RUTHERFORD EPICUREANISM Edited by JAMES WARREN EXISTENTIALISM Edited by STEVEN CROWELL FEMINISM IN PHILOSOPHY Edited by MIRANDA FRICKER and JENNIFER HORNSBY FOUCAULT 2nd edition Edited by GARY GUTTING FREGE Edited by THOMAS RICKETTS and MICHAEL POTTER FREUD Edited by JEROME NEU Continued at the back of the book © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information The Cambridge Companion to EXISTENTIALISM Edited by Steven Crowell Rice University © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521513340 © Cambridge University Press 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge companion to existentialism / edited by Steven Crowell, Rice University, Houston. pages cm. – (Cambridge companions to philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-51334-0 (hardback) – isbn 978-0-521-73278-9 (paperback) 1. Existentialism. i. Crowell, Steven Galt, editor of compilation. b819.c28 2012 142’.78–dc23 2011044362 isbn 978-0-521-51334-0 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-73278-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information CONTENTS List of contributors page ix I Introduction 1 Existentialism and its legacy 3 Steven Crowell II Existentialism in Historical Perspective 2 Existentialism as a philosophical movement 27 David E. Cooper 3 Existentialism as a cultural movement 50 William McBride III Major Existentialist Philosophers 4 Kierkegaard’s single individual and the point of indirect communication 73 Alastair Hannay 5 “What a monster then is man”: Pascal and Kierkegaard on being a contradictory self and what to do about it 96 Hubert L. Dreyfus 6 Nietzsche: after the death of God 111 Richard Schacht 7 Nietzsche: selfhood, creativity, and philosophy 137 Lawrence J. Hatab vii © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information viii CONTENTS 8 Heidegger: the existential analytic of Dasein 158 William Blattner 9 The antinomy of being: Heidegger’s critique of humanism 178 Karsten Harries 10 Sartre’s existentialism and the nature of consciousness 199 Steven Crowell 11 Political existentialism: the career of Sartre’s political thought 227 Thomas R. Flynn 12 Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism: freedom and ambiguity in the human world 252 Kristana Arp 13 Merleau-Ponty on body, flesh, and visibility 274 Taylor Carman IV The Reach of Existential Philosophy 14 Existentialism as literature 291 Jeff Malpas 15 Existentialism and religion 322 Merold Westphal 16 Racism is a system: how existentialism became dialectical in Fanon and Sartre 342 Robert Bernasconi 17 Existential phenomenology, psychiatric illness, and the death of possibilities 361 Matthew Ratcliffe and Matthew Broome Bibliography 383 Index 407 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information Contributors KRISTANA ARP is Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and the author of The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics (2001). ROBERT BERNASCONI is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of two books on Heidegger and of How to Read Sartre (2006). He is co-editor with Simon Critchley of The Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levinas (2002) and with Jonathan Judaken of the forthcoming Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context. He is also the author of numerous articles in the critical philosophy of race and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy. WILLIAM BLATTNER is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide (2006) and Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (1999). MATTHEW BROOME is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Warwick and Consultant Psychiatrist, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust, UK. He is also Chair of the Philosophy Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Together with Lisa Bortolotti, Broome edited Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives (2009) and is currently co-editing The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry with colleagues from the Maudsley Philosophy Group. ix © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51334-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Exist Entialism Edited by Steven Crowell Frontmatter More information x list of Contributors TAYLOR CARMAN is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (2004) and author of Heidegger’s Analytic (2003) and Merleau-Ponty (2008).