At the Existentialist Café

A group biography and history of ideas that tells the story of existentialism and phenomenology through the lives of the people who made them. It opens in Paris in the early 1930s, when Raymond Aron tells Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir about the new German philosophy of phenomenology over apricot cocktails, explaining that it lets you philosophise about the cocktail itself. Bakewell then goes back to Edmund Husserl's call to return "to the things themselves" and to Martin Heidegger's question of Being, and follows Sartre, Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas and others through occupation, liberation, the Cold War and broken friendships. She explains key ideas, including intentionality, being-in-the-world, freedom, bad faith, the Other and embodiment, in plain language, and faces hard questions such as Heidegger's Nazism. The book closes by asking what these thinkers still offer readers who care about freedom and authenticity.

It makes existentialism and phenomenology vivid and understandable by showing how they grew out of real lives, friendships and political crises.