Albert Camus

1913-1960 · French Algerian · Existentialism, Moral Philosophy, Absurdism, Political Philosophy, Literature

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Growing up in poverty in Algiers — his father killed at the Marne before he turned one, his mother barely literate — Camus absorbed early what no theory supplies: the stubborn weight of concrete life against abstraction. Awarded a Nobel at forty-four, he died three years later in a car crash, the manuscript of his unfinished novel in the mud beside him.

Topics Albert Camus addresses

• the absurd
• philosophical suicide
• revolt
• la mesure
• Sisyphus and the rock
• absurd freedom
• the silence of the world
• metaphysical revolt
• historical revolt
• neither victims nor executors
• the scrupulous murderer
• ends and means
• Mediterranean thought
• la pensée de midi
• revolutionary violence
• Hellenism against historicism
• the judge-penitent
• lucidity
• fidelity
• the plague as metaphor
• Caligula and the impossible
• state terror
• the civilian truce
• the death penalty

Converse with Albert Camus on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Albert Camus's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.