Customer Reviews

Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is divided into seven parts:
1. Forerunners
2. Phenomenology and ontology
3. The existential subject
4. Intersubjectivity
5. Atheist, humanist and religious existentialism
6. Existentialism and psychotherapy
7. Issues and conclusions

The range of writers featured is very broad. There are all the usual suspects, Sartre, Buber, Frankl, Kirekegaard, Camus, Tillich, Jaspers, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and so on, but there also many names I wasn't familiar with, such as Rosensweig, Ebner, Berdyaev, Lynd, and Maritain, for example. In total, there are more than 50 different authors featured. Oddly, there is nothing by Simone de Beauvoir. Possibly this is because her contribution to existentialist thought was rather belatedly recognized and this book was published back in 1964. I was also a little surprised that R.D. Laing was absent from the psychotherapy section of the book. But it's difficult to complain too hard given the wealth of what is included.

I liked the style of this reader. Friedman does not restrict himself to simply selecting intact portions of text from the writers concerned. He does do this, but often he instead produces abbreviated versions by quoting a sequence of selected short extracts - a kind of edited highlights approach (usefully he gives page numbers for each extract). To me, this works really well. It also allows him to fit even more into the 550 pages. There are hundreds of selections, so this book is great for opening at random and letting yourself be surprised.

The only real downside is that there is nothing here that was published post-1964. This means, for example, that although the psychotherapy section includes Rollo May, Medard Boss and the Rogers-Buber dialogue, there is necessarily no Irvin Yalom or James Bugental. Even so, I've still given this book 5 stars because of the quality, quantity and breadth of what it does include. And anyway, I can't really criticise Maurice Friedman for not including work that hadn't been written at the time he published this book.

A phenomenal amount of work has clearly gone into choosing and arranging the various selections from so many different sources. The result is in an excellent reader, and I recommend it highly.

The copy I ordered was meant to replace an earlier one that I had either lost, misplaced or inadvertently given away (by way of a loan). This collection is probably the most instructive, balanced and comprehensive of anthologies on existentialism and its manifestations over time. It's rather like vintage wine that continues to have strength and taste with the years.