A powerful new anthology that redefines our understanding of existentialism and argues for its contemporary relevance.

'Superb ... I can't imagine a better way of meeting the existentialists in all their variety' - Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café

'Existentialist thought [...] is an effort to reconcile the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical.' Simone de Beauvoir

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a group of intellectuals gathered to discuss urgent questions of existence, commitment, racism, colonialism, and feminism. Their ideas would continue to shape those debates throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

his major new anthology gathers the key texts of existentialism, and their major intellectual influences, along with other works previously neglected in overviews and anthologies of the movement. Incorporating the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, alongside selections from Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, it significantly expands and redefines our understanding of what existentialism means, and why it matters.

Edited with an Introduction by Jonathan Webber

A superb selection of texts, both thorough and adventurous. I can't imagine a better way of meeting the existentialists in all their variety -- Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café
Webber is an expert on French Existentialism... it’s wonderful to have this range of existentialist writings in a single affordable volume -- Nigel Warburton * The Best Philosophy Books of 2025, Five Books *

Jonathan Webber is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of Rethinking Existentialism (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge, 2009), editor of Reading Sartre: on Phenomenology and Existentialism (Routledge, 2011), and translator of Sartre's book The Imaginary (Routledge, 2004). He has written on existentialism for public audiences at Aeon, New Statesman, and Times Literary Supplement. He is a trustee of the Mind Association and President of the UK Sartre Society.