Camus: A Critical Examination

Camus: A Critical Examination

Throughout his life, Albert Camus confronted the central dramas of our civilization: the existential anxiety over "the death of God" and the absurdity of human existence; the political struggles over social injustice, capital punishment, and national liberation; and the international focus on nuclear annihilation, violations of human rights, and torture. Addressing the West at its metaphysical and mythic roots, Camus sought to diagnose the interior forces that seemed to propel humanity toward self-destruction. David Sprintzen offers the first original and comprehensive analysis in English of the thought of Albert Camus from a philosophical perspective. Previous literary and psychoanalytical studies have presented Camus’s life and works biographically, but philosophers have neither taken his thought seriously nor examined his work as a whole. With analytical precision and philosophical depth, Sprintzen confronts a corpus whose contemporary resonances as well as Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins dramatize the metaphysical foundations of Western experience. In this seventy-fifth anniversary of the philosopher’s birth, Camus: A Critical Examination shows how his analysis of political action offers a radical and nondogmatic perspective from which contemporary struggles can gain significant illumination.