Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary

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The standard interpretation keeps repeating that Camus is the prototypical absurdist thinker. Such a reading freezes Camus at the stage at which he wrote The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. By taking seriously how (1) Camus was always searching and (2) the rest of his corpus, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary corrects the one-sided, and thus faulty, depiction of Camus as committed to a philosophy of absurdism. His guiding project, which he explicitly acknowledged, was an attempt to get beyond nihilism, the general dismissal of value and meaning in ordinary life. Tracing this project via Camuss works, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary, offers a new lens for thinking about the well-known author.

Reviews

Ray Boisvert is among a growing group of scholars reading Camus with fresh eyes and a renewed concern for the central questions that animate his work. Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary is a thought-provoking analysis of the modern crisis Camus sought to reckon with and overcome. * Ron Srigley, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Humber College, Canada *

Author Bio

Raymond D. Boisvert is Professor of Philosophy at Siena College in Albany, New York. He is the author of I Eat: Therefore I Think (2014) and Philosophers at Table (2016).