What Is Existentialism?

by William Barrett

Foreword
What is Existentialism?
Heidegger: The Silent Power of the Possible

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

William Christopher Barrett (1913 – 1992) was a professor of philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979. Precociously, he began post-secondary studies at the City College of New York when 15 years old. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He was an editor of Partisan Review and later the literary critic of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. He was well-known for writing philosophical works for nonexperts. Perhaps the best known among these were Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy and The Illusion of Technique , which remain in print.

Reviews

[Rojita Rojîta]

خوندن این کتاب برای من وقت تلف کردن بود! نمیدونم چرا واقعا ولی هیچ چیزی به من اضافه نکرد!
شاید ترجمه بد بود

[Joseph Morris]

I have to disclaim that this is a review twenty years after the fact that I read it so it's sort of like reviewing one of those childhood movies that you're not sure how it would do on rereading. I can certainly tell you without a doubt that I pick this this up from my dad's bookshelf in my early 20s and it made me really interested in philosophy, and wanting to read more about philosophical developments of the twentieth century; and it was the start of a lifelong sort of fascination with phenomenological reality and the strangeness of being here.

[Toby Newton]

William Barrett writes beautifully and clearly and modestly. In this book, which is founded on the figure of Martin Heidegger, he carefully traces the latter's insights to modern Western consciousness, as a reading of the trajectory of post-Greek thought via Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche to our current technocratic, instrumentalist, metric-fixated autism.

Reading his exposition, published in 1964, sixty years down the line, only makes its value - as well as the value of Heidegger's diagnosis/prognosis - more plain. We've followed a corridor that has led us to a juncture where physicists and their deathly insights hold the future of our species in the balance, and where, somehow, this seems like a sane proposition.

We've been two thousand years on the journey and we're a long way down the corridor, and for those unconvinced by the mewlings of Musk and the seductions of Schwab, the prospects are bleak. Yet Barrett urges cautious optimism, "The silent power of the possible is still at work in man. At the end of the long corridor of night some other possibilities may reveal themselves to man, and human civilization may take a new turn ... The new possibilities will have to be changes of the total outlook of man." Agreed.

[Farkhondeh Nazarian]

برای منی که هیچ پیش زمینه‌ای تو این موضوع ندارم، کمک کننده نبود.

[Reza Boroumand]

کتابی در ستایش ، منحصر به فرد ترین شخصیت زیرزمینی تاریخ