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The cover of At the Existentialist Café

At the Existentialist Café

Sarah Bakewell, 2016

Follow Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger, and their circle as phenomenology becomes a lived philosophy of freedom, ambiguity, embodiment, political responsibility, and moral risk.

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7 parts, about 22 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Bakewell tells existentialism and phenomenology through the lives, friendships and quarrels of the thinkers who tried to live their ideas
  • Gives you working tools like bad faith, situated freedom and close description of experience for questions of how to live
  • Weighs the philosophers' lives against their theories, showing what each idea helped them see and what it let them overlook

Who it is for

  • Readers curious about philosophy but wary of dense texts
  • People questioning the roles and labels they live by
  • Fans of intellectual history told through personalities

What the summary covers

  1. A Cocktail and a New Kind of Philosophy4 min
  2. Phenomenology Becomes a Philosophy of Existence3 min
  3. Ideas Under Dictatorship and War3 min
  4. Freedom, Bad Faith, and Engagement4 min
  5. Freedom Becomes Situated and Embodied3 min
  6. Political Commitments Split the Café2 min
  7. Existentialism Beyond the Café3 min

Recommended by

  • Julian BagginiPhilosopher and writer
    Perhaps the aphorism that best captures the book is one of Bakewell’s own: ‘Thinking should be generous and have a good appetite.’
  • Janet MaslinFormer New York Times book critic
    At the Existentialist Café is a bracingly fresh look at once-antiquated ideas and the milieu in which they flourished.
  • Nigel WarburtonPhilosopher and writer

About the author

  • Sarah BakewellBritish author who received the Windham Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction
    • Born in Bournemouth, England; her parents ran a small hotel
    • Studied philosophy at the University of Essex
    • Worked as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library from the early 1990s
    • Left the library in 2002 to write full time

Read it alongside

  • Puts it into practiceStaring at the Sun

    Sarah Bakewell presents Heidegger's view that authenticity means owning one's existence, especially by facing mortality; Irvin Yalom reports that many of the cancer patients he treated were transformed by facing death.

  • Goes deeperBeing You: A New Science of Consciousness

    Sarah Bakewell presents Merleau Ponty as holding that perception starts from a body already in the world; Anil Seth proposes that perception is the brain's prediction, tied to action, with selfhood rooted in the body's regulation of itself.

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