Existentialism offers enduring lessons and insight on how to understand ourselves and improve our lives.
Your existence is not the result of a pre-determined set of events, it’s the direct result of your thinking and your actions, and therefore, according to Soren Kierkegaard, Frederick Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and other Existentialist philosophers, you have the freedom to control the outcome of your existence—sophisticated ""philosophy meets psychology"" self-help for the twenty-first-century.
As Kierkegaard and his ilk made clear in their respective works, human beings are moody creatures. Rather than understanding moods such as anxiety and depression as afflictions that can only be treated with a pill, the Existentialists regard these troublesome feelings as instructive, something revealing about what it means to be human. The Existentialists believed that how we negotiate our emotional ups-and-downs plays an important hand in the lives we sculpt for ourselves.
While offering listeners a useful primer on Existentialism as an animating body of thought, Marino distills and delivers the life-altering and, in some cases, life-saving insights Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and other Existentialists articulate for becoming more emotionally attuned human beings. Enhancing our sense of meaning in the midst of an uncertain world, Marino interjects gripping anecdotes from his own experiences to demonstrate how we can use existentialist thought to ignite truly transformative experiences.
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“This book is a perfect choice for all who wonder what existentialism is all about…A profound adventure awaits those readers ready to immerse themselves in this jewel of a book.”
— Edward F. Mooney, professor of philosophy and religion at Syracuse University, on Basic Writings of Existentialism
“A remarkable book. We can’t think of another writer who so thoroughly understands Kierkegaard and his followers.”
— Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, New York Times bestselling authorsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. He is the author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age, coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, and editor of Basic Writings of Existentialism, Ethics: The Essential Writings, and The Quotable Kierkegaard. An active boxing trainer, Gordon writes about boxing for the Wall Street Journal, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other periodicals. He lives in Northfield, Minnesota.
Joe Knezevich is an audiobook narrator and award-winning actor. He earned a BFA in acting from Florida State University and studied in London. In addition to his work on the stage, he has appeared in many roles on the small screen and in film, including in The Change Up, Parental Guidance, 42, The Last of Robin Hood, and Allegiant.