Sarah Bakewell/ Andy Martin/ Stella Sandford

The Maurice Fraser Memorial Lecture 

Listen to the podcast here or on YouTube

Part of  LSE Literary Festival 2017: Revolutions  with an introduction by Sylvie Bermann, French Ambassador to the UK

6.30 – 8pm | Friday 24 February 2017
Wolfson Theatre, LSE

Speakers
Sarah Bakewell, Author of At the Existentialist Cafe and How to Live.
Andy Martin, Author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus and Lecturer in French, University of Cambridge
Stella Sandford, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London

Chair
Shahidha Bari, Lecturer in Romanticism in the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’, asks Martin Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics. In this panel, we explore the ideas of being and nothing as described by existentialism’s most famous thinkers: Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. We ask what is the allure of the existentialists that their reputations should endure in popular and contemporary culture? And how is it that existentialist philosophy can be, at once, avidly consumed by modern audiences and unapologetically esoteric? Coffee, French cigarettes, and black polo necks not provided; intelligent discussion and provocative questions most definitely are.