Sarah Bakewell Books

Our story truly begins with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Husserl, a mathematician turned philosopher in late-nineteenth-century Central Europe, grew dissatisfied with the intellectual chaos of his time. Philosophy, he felt, had lost touch with its primordial task—to understand how t...

From At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, And Apricot Cocktails

Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s most brilliant student and later his betrayer in more ways than one, radically reinterpreted phenomenology. For him, philosophy was not simply about describing experience but about confronting the question of Being itself—why there is something rather than nothing, and wh...

From At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, And Apricot Cocktails

To understand Montaigne’s essays, we must walk briefly into sixteenth-century France, a world shaken by the Wars of Religion. Montaigne was born into privilege in 1533, yet his life unfolded amidst uncertainty. Humanism was flourishing—the study of classical texts had rekindled interest in the digni...

From How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

After years in public service, worn out by politics, Montaigne retreated to his family estate in 1571. In his library tower, surrounded by inscriptions from classical authors carved into the beams, he began to write. His purpose was not literary ambition but personal restoration. Writing became his ...

From How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Humanism did not arrive fully formed in Florence’s libraries; it began in the shadowed academies and scriptoria of the Middle Ages. Before we could claim liberty of thought, scholars had to learn how to read anew. I start this journey with figures such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham—men who...

From Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

When Francesco Petrarch looked upon the ruins of Rome, he felt both grief and awe. He was mourning a civilization forgotten and awakening to the idea that we could reclaim its grandeur through words. This was the dawn of Renaissance humanism—a belief that the study of classical antiquity could renew...

From Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope