Common threads · 6 books
Faith, temporality, consciousness, absurdity, and situated freedom. Follow a set of influential encounters without flattening their authors into one school.
Books, curator notes, and what to read next.
Søren Kierkegaard
Read the Abraham story and the problemata with attention to the pseudonymous voice. Test the proposed tension between faith and ethics.
Next: Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Begin with everyday being-in-the-world before the chapters on death and temporality. Keep a glossary as the vocabulary develops.
Next: Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre
Begin with consciousness, bad faith, and relations with others. Test how Sartre's technical account supports his claims about freedom.
Next: The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
Camus asks how to live with the absurd. Track his argument about revolt without assuming he shares every existentialist conclusion.
Next: Existentialism Is a Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre
Read Sartre's defense of existentialism as an argument about choice and responsibility, then test its account of freedom.
Next: The Ethics of Ambiguity
Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir connects freedom with the freedom of others. Ask how situated lives complicate a purely individual account of choice.
Also includes The Myth of Sisyphus
Freedom, absurdity, commitment, and meaning. These books offer arguments about living well rather than promises of an easy answer.
Also includes Being and Time
Start with time as lived experience, then test philosophical accounts of persistence, temporal order, and what it means to exist over time.
Also includes Being and Time
Study the fear of death, the value of a finite life, and our dependence on a future we will never personally see.
