David Cerbone knows it can be hard to read about philosophy. Throw in a bit of existentialism, and the challenge intensifies.

So Cerbone, a philosophy professor at WVU, has written a new book to help folks find their way through the maze of names like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre.

“Existentialism: All That Matters” is a guidebook to understanding the basic principles of existentialism. Several chapters of the book are devoted to prominent figures in existentialism, such as S�ren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. The chapters will help to explain the work of these philosophers.

“Very often if you just try to pick up works in philosophy by existentialist writers, they can be very rough going,” Cerbone said. “It’s often difficult to just pick these books up, just start reading them and feel like you’re understanding them at all.

“I’ve been teaching existentialism for almost 20 years, and even students with a background in philosophy will struggle with it quite a bit. So, part of the purpose of the book is to lay out some of the basic ideas and cut through some of the difficult terminology.”

Existentialism is a philosophical school of thought that analyzes human existence. Existentialists study concepts such as human nature, freedom, anxiety, death and the absurd.

Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said that the central idea of existentialism is that when it comes to human existence, “Existence precedes essence.”

“That’s pretty mysterious, which is why you need an introductory book to explain what it means,” Cerbone said. “Basically, what he’s saying is to talk about the essence of something is to talk about what it is. To talk about existence is to talk about that it is.”

He explained that for most things in the world, what something is – its essence – determines the way that it is, so essence precedes existence. But what existentialism claims is that when it comes to human beings, it’s the other way around: there is nothing that we are prior to the way we actually exist. According to existentialism, we are free to determine the kind of beings we are: we determine our essence through the choices we make.

“There’s something distinctive about human existence, that it has a special character or a special structure,” Cerbone said. “Part of what existentialism as a whole is devoted to doing is trying to lay out or articulate what that special structure of human existence is.”

Cerbone teaches courses in existentialism and continental philosophy. His research includes themes in continental philosophy, phenomenology and the works of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

“Existentialism: All That Matters,” was published in June 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton. It is available in paperback in the United Kingdom and is currently only available in the United States as an e-book. A U.S. paperback version will be available in September 2015.

Hodder & Stoughton’s ‘All That Matters’ series includes books from numerous authors that teach the readers ‘all that matters’ to have a basic understanding of a wide variety of topics.

-WVU-

as/07/20/2015

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