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"do we really want to understand our lives & manage our futures as if we had neither real freedom nor a truly human foundation for our existence? Perhaps we need the existentialists more than we thought.."

"Heidegger who admired Celan's work, tried to make him feel welcome in Freiburg. He even asked a book dealer friend to go around all the bookshops in the city making sure they put Celan titles in their windows so the poet would see them as he walked through town. This is a touching story, especially as it is the single documented example I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice"

"The rebel demands a return to the 'here & now'. Havel says - to what Husserl would have called the things themselves. He conducts an epoche, in which the cant is set aside & each person sees what is in front of his or her eyes. Eventually, the result will be an 'existential revolution': people's relationship to the 'human order' is overhauled & they can return to the authentic experience of things."

"What you read influences your life: the story of existentialism as it spread round the world in the 50s & 60s bears this out more than any other modern philosophy. By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, & the anti-racist & anti-colonial struggles, it helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways"

Algerian war of independence "Camus' view was that...people will always do violent things, but philosophers & state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them"

"Merleau-Ponty was almost unique among the existentialist milieu in not being prone to ...attacks of uncanniness or anxiety. It was an important difference between him & the neurotic Sartre. Merleau-Ponty was not followed down the street by lobsters; he had no fear of chestnut trees, & was not haunted by the thought of other people staring at him & fixing him in their judgemental gaze"

"For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness can never be a 'nothingness' radically divided from being, as Sartre had proposed in Being & Nothingness. He does not even see it as a 'clearing' like Heidegger...consciousness, he suggests, is like a 'fold' in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away"

Ethics of ambiguity 1947 Beauvoir "argued that the question of of the relationship between our physical constraints & the assertion of our freedom is not a 'problem' requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, & our task is to learn to manage the movement & uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it"

"One major point of disagreement between Sartre & Genet concerned Genet's homosexuality. Sartre interpreted it as part of Genet's creative response to being labelled a pariah - thus, a free choice of outsiderhood & contrariness. Instead, for Genet, it was a given fact.. He argued this point with Sartre, but Sartre was adamant"

"The Second Sex could have become established in the canon as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times...Beauvoir evaluated human lives afresh by showing we are profoundly gendered beings"