Product Description: Richard Appignanesi goes in personal quest of Existentialism in its original state. He begins with Camus' question of suicide: 'Must life have a meaning to be lived?' Is absurdity at the heart of Existentialism? Or is Sartre right: is Existentialism 'the least scandalous, most technically austere' of all teachings?
Not an Introduction I recently became a big fan of the Introducing series, but I'll have to say that this book is both frustrating and disappointing. I do not know much about Existentialism (hence why I bought the book) but I can point to what appear to be some problems with the book with what little I know. For example, the book spends a lot of time concentrating on Husserl, who is arguably not an existentialist philosopher. One of Sartre's central concept of "bad faith" in mentioned only once on page 19 and is not really explained. The famous "Existence precedes essence" quote of Sartre is nowhere to be found. There are probably other major concepts that are missing or not clearly explained, but again, I don't know enough (perhaps even less!) about the subject after reading this book.
Another criticism is the style. Most of the Introducing books tend to go in chronological order or in some logical order showing the development of a particular subject. This book is framed more as the author's own journey into solving particular puzzles that are supposedly connected to existentialism, but it in no way elucidates the subject. It jumps from subject to subject, few of which appear to deal with Existentialism in any way (or in any way that is clearly explained). The writing style tends to be a little thick and phrased in such a way to make the meaning more obscure (e.g. "Heidegger rightly means that the 'crisis' of science is not its own but ours by unmindfulness of how science came entirely to occupy our horizon of 'being in the world'." p. 59). It reads like someone trying to make a simple concept sound more profound by superfluous wording and meaningless analogies. It's like the really pretentious guy at the cocktail party who tells stories about himself and make everything that happens in his daily life sound like an epic of spiritual fulfillment.
In short, this is not an introduction. Without knowing any better, it appears to be the author's attempt to explore what are probably no more than footnotes of Existentialist philosophy and perhaps some of his own interpretations of what other philosophers saw or meant. I did not buy this book to read someone else's dissertation on some marginal concepts. I want to be spoon-fed the basic concepts as conceived by the principal philosophers of the subject. The Introducing Philosophy and even Wikipedia provide a much better overview of the subject in a few pages than this book.
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