What books would you recommend for an absolute beginner on existentialism?

Otherwise maybe wait for the OUP's Very Short Introduction on it (it might already be out, actually)

Also here're a few choice morsels from a good bibliography:

Macquarrie, J. (1972) Existentialism, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster. (A dependable and clear survey of existentialist thought. Extensive bibliography listing older works on existentialism.)

Solomon, R.C. (1972) From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds, New York: Harper & Row. (The best account of existentialism in its historical context.)

Cooper, D.E. (1990) Existentialism: A Reconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell; 2nd edn, 1999. (An up-to-date and thorough survey of existentialist thought. Helpful bibliography.)

Guignon, C. (ed.) (2003) The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (Scholarly essays by major Anglophone philosophers on four major representatives of the existentialist tradition.)

Guignon, C. and Pereboom, D. (eds) (1995) Existentialism: Basic Writings , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (Core texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, with extensive introductions by the editors.)

Warnock, M. (1970) Existentialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Clear exposition of the basic concepts.)

Yeep. I really thought that course was terrible. It was one of the first TTC lectures I couldn't make it through (although there have been more since).

Which is to say, from the philosopher's vantage, the literature as such gets subsumed; aesthetics and formal features of the novel, while important, take a backseat to the ideas

camus is much more a humanist/journalist in the mode of orwell than he is an existentialist, but his three novels and all his essays are essential reading.

I've been reading these Jataka lately, stories that are supposed to be of the incarnations of the Buddha before his main life. They're basically little fables with moral lessons attached. Many of the stories are terrific, and some of the moral lessons are probably worth taking to heart, too. But the fables and the morals are just assertions. After all, you could imagine how, "in real life", something might have gone slightly different, and the fable would have ended up interpretable in a completely different way. Maybe the fox could have reached those grapes after all, and not worried about them being sour (to draw from a different set of fables).

And I'm going to argue that philosophy is not assertion, but rather the reasons attached to the assertion or the consequences of the assertion. And that fables might pretend to illustrate the reasons or the consequences of the assertions, they can do no such thing, because the logic of real life and the logic of narrative operate in totally different ways. Instead, fables are memorable ways for us to remember these assertions, which for completely other reasons (hopefully) we agree with, or which for completely other reasons (hopefully) we consider.

And those TTC lectures seemed really to want to use, say, the Stranger and its plot as evidence that added to the weight of Camus's philosophical assertions. And I just think the events in a novel can't count as empirical evidence (outside of the novel) no matter how good of a novel it is.

(glad to meet you ILB folks, btw)

(the notion of incarnating serious philosophical ideas in a novel doesn't bug me so much as a point of principle so much as it bugs me because it is kind of lame.)

Tom, I'll let you know when I find one. These are poorly proofread but more readable by far than the Rhys Davids edited Dover book of them I have. (And, "Jataka".)

However, I wouldn't have phrased it quite as steve ketchup did in saying that all writing is fiction, but rather I would say that writing becomes memborable and eventful to the degree that it is artful. Both fiction and non-fiction employ rhetoric and the pose of objectivity and factuality is simply another rhetorical device toward the author's desired artistic goal, whether that goal is to teach, to persuade or to entertain. So, all writing is rhetorical, to the extent it has any viewpoint whatsoever.

Anyhow, Casuistry: I'm unclear on your claims that "fables and the morals just assertions" and that 'philosophy is not assertion, but rather the reasons [etc.]"--mainly because I'm unclear about what assertion means to you. For instance, whether it's just a simple speech act in general vs. (to use another word that's vague-ish in the field) a proposition about something in the world. If it's either of those two, for example, your ... assertions wouldn't really be coherent, I don't think. Could you clarify a bit?

Still, I wouldn't think one could profitably eliminate Zarathustra, Candide, Rassellas, or Plato's dialogues from the the texts of philosophy. I also don't see how ideas have "evidence" besides that they exist because someone thought and expressed them --regardless of method. Proof exists in logic and mathematics: philosophy, regardless of rigor, is ultimately opinion. I never got the impression that Camus or Sartre or any other existentialist was trying to prove anything, just communicate by one means or another their points of view.

Philosophy, I think, isn't very good at setting up edifices, but it is very good at tearing them down.

You might want something out of philosophy that I'm not interested in, however. In which case, we can agree to disagree.