At the Existentialist Café

She found them exciting and intimidating. They laughed at her because she took her studies so seriously — as of course she did, since being at the Sorbonne represented everything she had worked so hard to achieve. Education meant freedom and self-determination to her, whereas the boys took it for granted.

‘It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.’

Husserl, although a Christian, kept his faith separate from his work.

we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

There is no God in this picture, because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him.

Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters.

‘Existence precedes essence’

Of all the perplexing things about ‘being’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realise that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything is?

Just as Karl Jaspers had turned from psychology to phenomenology in order to practise ‘a different thinking’, Heidegger felt that the question of Being must be truly philosophical or it is nothing. Moreover, it should not be philosophical in the old-fashioned way, focused narrowly on questions of what we can know. A new new beginning is needed.
For Heidegger, this means not only starting with Being but ensuring constant vigilance and care in thinking. He generously helps us to achieve this by using a frustrating kind of language.

if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!