#88: Rethinking Existentialism: Freedom, Meaning, and the Search for Authenticity | Jonathan Webber

Was Jean-Paul Sartre wrong about freedom? Professor Jonathan Webber — Cardiff University philosopher and President of the UK Sartre Society — joins The Prometheans to argue that existentialism is not the vague literary mood most people think it is, but a rigorous ethical theory with a precise argument at its core: that human freedom is the foundation of all value.

We trace the real philosophical drama behind the term "existentialism" — from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's 1945 "existentialist offensive," through Beauvoir's rival theory of "sedimentation" (which Sartre himself would later come to accept), to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and its place at the heart of the existentialist canon.

Jonathan Webber is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University and author of Rethinking Existentialism (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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