Customer Reviews

Existentialism: A Beginner's Guide (Beginners Guide (Oneworld))

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Existentialism should be pitied. Its ideas are exciting and urgent. It inspires great novels. It even promises to restore the relevance of philosophy to real life. Yet the movement's canonical philosophical texts are unreadable. Never have so many bedrock human problems been analyzed in such inhumanly turgid (and longwinded) prose. Never has a philosophical movement been so disserved by its most important philosophers.

Fortunately, "Existentialism: A Beginner's Guide" is a fantastic primer for anyone who wants to know the basics of existentialist philosophy. The exposition is clear and logical, and sticks to a few key themes. Concepts are illustrated with examples from literature and movies. The author even uses autobiography to connect abstract ideas to real problems of life. Though a professor, he remembers why ordinary people are drawn to philosophy!

With this book under their belt, readers might want to tackle ponderous tomes by Heidegger and Sartre. But even if they don't (and they might not want to once they get 10 pages into "Being and Time"), they will be left with real insights into bad faith, dasein, anxiety, the "They," and other strange-sounding existentialist ideas that lose much of their strangeness when approached via this book. Highly recommended.

I've been looking for this for a long time: a great little book about Exsitentialism - and a really good read. There's nothing else like it on the market. Mr Wartenberg writes clearly and accessibly about a difficult subject for non-philosophers like me to get our heads round. You can read it as a stand-alone or as a starting point. If you want to read more, the key texts - both philosophy and literary ones - are given. Key figures are given in short thumbnail sketches as and when they crop up in the main text, which gives you a context. The main ideas are explored with the aid of examples and Mr. Wartenberg doesn't get caught up in the complicated side-issues and arguments that always arise in philosophy. Read it - you'll be enlightened!

Thomas Wartenberg has written a superb introduction to the philosophy of Existentialism. He states, "My goal in writing this book is to reveal the excitement and allure of Existentialism in such a way that even my own teenage self - and thus everyone who has found the Existentialists' ideas useful but hard to comprehend - can grasp them. Whether I have succeeded, of course, is not for me to say." - I believe he has.

Wartenberg covers all the major Existentialists (Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Kierkegaard, et al) in nine easy to read chapters: 1) Existence, 2) Freedom, 3) Others, 4) Anxiety, 5) Finitude, 6) The Absurd, 7) Authenticity, 8) Oppression and 9) Conclusion. My degree is in Philosophy and I took a class on Existentialism in college and I can say that this book is quite good and that it can prepare anyone to move on to some more challenging books such as Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy or Basic Writings of Existentialism (Modern Library Classics). Highly recommended; I have found that the "Beginners Guides" books are usually very good.

Great book, wonderful read. Very well written. This is a philosophy page-turner, if such a thing can exist. It presents what would be difficult concepts and ideas in such a way as to make them easy for any kind of reader, even for beginners like myself.

You can get a very good idea of existentialism and then move ahead to more profound reading..

Excellent. This is a better read than the Oxford Very Short Introduction title. The professor is articulate and writes in a clarifying manner. The book is well organized and I appreciated the side box background information.

I have had heard about Existentialism, but did not understand its primary concepts and how this philosophy differs from others. Wartenberg presents a lucid and concise review of the main themes and tenets of Existentialism. His style is accessible, the book is well organized, and he includes relevant examples from contemporary literature and arts. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it has spurred me to do further reading on this compelling subject.

really good book that informs on existentialism without bogging non-philosophy types down in jargon or argumentation. I studied philosophy in college so a lot of the ideas were not foreign to me but even if they were they are well explained.

I've no real previous experience with philosophy, but I'd read a few things about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that made me want to explore their ideas a little further. So I picked this up on Kindle and finished reading it on an out-of-town business trip.

While both of those thinkers get some discussion, the text focuses primarily on Sartre, with additional material based on Camus, de Beauvoir, and Heidegger. Wartenberg does a fine job taking some rather dense material and explaining it much like an engaged professor teaching an undergraduate class. In fact, motivated and intelligent high-school students could certainly work their way through it as well. While most of the examples come from classic literature (Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare in particular), he also uses a number of modern-day analogues like The Matrix and his own life that illuminate some of the examples.

I feel like I have a better understanding of "existential angst" and some of the core concepts, and the afterword notes areas that he didn't have space to include. While I would have liked a little more discussion of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, this did a fine job of locating them in the stream of development as this area of thought has matured and extended.

This comprehensive introduction to the study of Existentialist philosophy is both a fun read and one to be taken seriously. From start to finish it is an intriguing journey into philosophical approaches to the nature of human existence. Notoriously difficult self-reflexive concepts are made very understandable and entertaining in this book as it explores a range of perspectives from classical to contemporary, including the consideration of films as texts. The journey reveals that existentialist philosophy is not old and dusty, but an ever-cogent approach to modern life questions.

The personal rewards of studying existentialism are not to be underestimated. Existentialist thinkers such as Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus awaken their readers as they pose questions that reveal and dispel learned denial and ignorance about the nature of human life in relation to reality. Whether you are already a deep-thinker in search of life's meaning or you are lost in a wasteland of disillusionment, the perspectives and questions introduced in this book will awaken you to a new level of authentic existence.