The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was one of the most original thinkers of the 19th Century – and one of the most enigmatic men who ever walked the Earth. Philosophically, Kierkegaard was the “bridge” that led from Hegel to Existentialism. Kierkegaard abhorred Hegel’s abstract, Know-it-all idealism that tried to capture reality in a few words. Kierkegaard’s attack on social and religious complacency and his single-handed assault on traditional Western philosophy generated a crisis that produced a radically new way of philosophizing and made him the founder of the school that would later be called Existentialism. To Kierkegaard, reality was personal, subjective – it began and ended with the individual – and philosophy was not something one merely talked about, it was the way you lived. For such a brilliant thinker, the way Kierkegaard lived was… somewhat too interesting? His “abstract” love affair? His obsession with death? His “leap of Faith,” his cynicism, his marvelous sense of humor – how do you put all that into one man? For starters, you read Kierkegaard For Beginners. It explains, plainly and simply, the great Danish thinker’s obsession with the particularity of human existence as well as his demonstration of how the creation of an authentic new kind of individual is possible

Sartre For Beginners is an accessible yet sophisticated introduction to the life and works of the famous French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre was a member of the French underground during WWII, a novelist, a playwright, and a major influence in French political and intellectual life. The book opens with a biographical section, introducing the significant events in the life of the man who coined the term “existentialism.” Then it examines Sartre’s early philosophical works. Ideas from Sartre’s other fictional and dramatic works are discussed, but the greatest part is the presentation of the main concepts from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). These include the topics of consciousness, freedom, responsibility, absurdity, “bad faith,” authenticity, and the hellish confrontation with other people. Finally, the book deals with Sartre’s modification of his early existentialism to compliment his conversion to a kind of “existential” Marxism. Sartre For Beginners summarizes the work of the most renown philosopher of the 20th Century.

Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the founder of Existentialism and the first modern theologian. Philosophy, in Kierkegaard's radical view, was of no use unless it permanently changed people's lives. His distrust of grand abstract schemes, particularly Hegel's, and his insistence that philosophy is essentially writing also identify him as a forerunner of postmodernism.

“What is Structuralism? How is it possible? And once the structures of Structuralism have been discovered, how is Poststructuralism possible?” Thus begins Don Palmer’s Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners. If Nobel or Pulitzer ever made a prize for making the most difficult philosophers and ideas accessible to the greatest number of people, one of the leading candidates would certainly be Professor Don Palmer. From his Sartre For Beginners and Kierkegaard For Beginners to his Looking at Philosophy, author/illustrator Don Palmer has the magic touch when it comes to translating the most brutally difficult ideas into language and images that non-specialists can understand. “In its less dramatic versions,” writes Palme, “structuralism is just a method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, an overall worldview that provides an account of reality and knowledge.” Poststructuralism is a loosely knit intellectual movement, comprised mainly of ex-structuralists, who either became dissatisfied with the theory or felt they could improve it. Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners is an illustrated tour through the mysterious landscape of Structuralism and Poststructuralism. The book’s starting point is the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Sausser. The book moves on to the anthropologist and literary critic Claude Lévi-Strauss; the semiologost and literary critic Roland Barthes; the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser; the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Learn among other things, why structuralists say Reality is composed of not Things, but Relationships Every “object” is both a presence and an absence The total system is present in each of its parts The parts are more real than the whole The book concludes by examining the postmodern obsession with language and with the radical claim of the disappearance of the individual – obsessions that unite the work of all these theorists.

This clear, readable introduction to Kierkegaard presents him as a thinker with powerful answers to the questions which philosophers ask.

Existentialism For Beginners is an entertaining romp through the history of a philosophical movement that has had a broad and enduring influence on Western culture. From the middle of the Nineteenth Century through the late Twentieth Century, existentialism informed our politics and art, and still exerts its influence today. Tracing the movement’s beginnings with close-up views of seminal figures like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, Existentialism For Beginners follows its intellectual and literary trail to German philosophers Jaspers and Heidegger, and finally to the movement’s flowering in post-World-War-II France thanks to masterworks by such giants as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, plus many others. Illustrations throughout — at once lighthearted and gritty — help readers explore and understand a style of thinking that, while pervasive in its influence, is often seen as obscure, difficult, cryptic and dark. Existentialism For Beginners draws the movement’s many diverse elements together to provide an accessible introduction for those who seek a better understanding of the topic, and an enjoyable historical review packed with timeless quotes from existentialism’s leading lights.