Jezebel was a much-maligned woman, but Dane Gordon wonders if she really deserved such a bad name. Jezebel is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is not a complimentary definition: “Name of the infamous wife of Ahab, King of Israel, hence, a wicked abandoned woman, or a woman who paints her face.” Webster’s Dictionary …
Cameron Hendy thinks it’s about time we all stopped. Do you recall the first time that you stumbled across Peter Zapffe (1899-1990) – assuming that you ever have done? I do. His antinatalism – the idea that the human race should stop reproducing – was new to me at the time; simultaneously exhilarating yet terrifying. …
Akif Rashid asks Albert Camus why so many people around him are unhappy and confused, and what to do about it. I tend not to live by very many adages, but I am inclined to a witticism once in a while. One of the lines close to my heart is by Henry James: “I’ve always …
Roger Karny takes another look at liberty and alienation. The New York Times called the 1953 novel The Outsider by African-American author Richard Wright (1908-1963) “prophetic… a book people should ponder”. The Outsider’s protagonist, Cross Damon, is an African-American intellectual who majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Victimized by white oppression, he is …
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Annabel Abbs follows Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts over the horizon. A few years ago I bought the book A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (2014). This entertaining volume featured a parade of thinkers for whom walking was profoundly important: Thoreau, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kant; even Gandhi, Kerouac and Rimbaud made appearances. Walking, Gros suggested, was …
Greg Artus contemplates (dis)embodiment, Zoom life and social media, through the ‘Looks’ of Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. In this past year of severe restrictions on physical social interaction, everyone seems to have been made starkly aware of the importance of what some existentialists would call Being-with-Others. A social life conducted through screens has shown people …
Sam Kelly says Jean-Paul Sartre was the Hunter S. Thompson of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is perhaps the most famous exponent of existentialism. His philosophy asserts that human beings are cursed with the impossible burden of having to make decisions without any higher justifications. There is no God or other transcendent force to dictate what …
Gary Cox considers the problematic side of freedom, from the edge of a cliff. Many of the central themes and concepts of existentialism – freedom, choice, responsibility, bad faith, anxiety, despair, and absurdity – originated in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), in such ground-breaking works as Either-Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept …
Eva Cybulska asks who Oedipus thinks he is. The myth of Oedipus is very old. It first appeared in written form in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays about the hero, as did Julius Caesar, Ovid and Seneca, and more recently Andr é Gide and Jean Cocteau. But the greatest version of …
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face. The 4th January 1960 was an overcast and drizzly day in northern central France. Albert Camus was returning to Paris with his publisher Michel Gallimard and Gallimard’s wife and daughter in a powerful four-door sports car, a Facel Vega. The Vega was infamous for its rear …