Author

Sarah Bakewell

16 key ideas across 2 books, each explained in our own words.

At the Existentialist Café

IDEA 1
A conversation over apricot cocktails
Bakewell begins with a story from 1933, when Sartre, Beauvoir and Raymond Aron sat in a Paris café drinking apricot cocktails. Aron explained phenomenology, a new philosophy that described experience directly, and Sartre was thrilled.
IDEA 2
Phenomenology describes experience
Bakewell explains phenomenology, developed by Edmund Husserl, which aims to describe experience as it appears. This approach inspired existentialist thinkers. Attention shifts from theories to the texture of lived experience.
IDEA 3
Heidegger asked about being
Bakewell describes Heidegger's work on being and authentic existence. She also discusses his troubling support for the Nazis. His brilliance and his politics remain hard to separate. Bakewell faces this honestly.

IDEA 1
A life told as twenty answers
Bakewell tells the life of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer, by asking how to live and giving twenty answers drawn from his life and writings. Each chapter takes one answer, such as paying attention or questioning everything.
IDEA 2
Montaigne invented the essay
Montaigne wrote short pieces exploring his own thoughts and experiences, which he called essays, meaning attempts. Bakewell shows how his honest self-examination created a new kind of writing. He wrote about everything, from friendship to cannibals.
IDEA 3
Don't fear death
After a near-fatal riding accident, Montaigne felt calm rather than terrified. Bakewell explains how this experience helped him stop worrying about death. Death, he decided, would look after itself when the time came.

Go deeper with Sarah BakewellAsk questions, argue with the ideas and practise using them, free.