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Review – At the Existentialist Cafe
At the Existential CafeĀ is about (as the title readily suggests) the movers and shakers in the modern line of existentialism. As Bakewell notes, this line can be traced in different ways: “…to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond that to Blaise Pascal…and beyond that to the soul-searching of St. Augustine, and beyond that to the Old Testament’s weary Ecclesiastes and to Job…But one can go the other way around, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism down to a moment near the turn of 1932-3, when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking…