At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, etc., etc.,

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others, by Sarah Bakewell, does an admirable job of explaining existentialism and its practitioners.  There is much to be admired in phenomenology and its offshoot, existentialism, and Bakewell provides us with a readable account of the major players.

I remember taking Krzysztof Michalski's class at Boston University on Heidegger’s Being and Time (and although he passed away six ago, BU still has a ghost link that makes him look very much alive) he kept giving us a variation of the same tag line answer as we questioned phenomenology.  

I remember coming away from the class with a lack of satisfaction; as if  the traditional philosophical questions were not being answered, but just shifted away.  But this professor was the head of an institute in Vienna, and he held the power to send graduate students to Austria as he saw fit.  So, no one questioned too closely.

But we should!  The post-war existentialism here detailed feels tired, long passed its expiration date; who cares if we live in bad faith?  Who yearns for authenticity?  Is sitting in a cafe in any way transgressive?   Post-war questions and their existentialist answers stayed in the post-war for the most part, while we have moved on.