Camus, the absurdist thinker extraordinaire; the one who gave absurdism its popular formulation. So at least goes the standard take. Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary offers a game-changing interpretation. It does so by paying attention to the entire Camusian corpus. By paying heed to works after theThe Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus Camus is revealed as a thinker who explicitly admitted that his early works represented neither his mature nor his final word. Camus is only an “absurdist” thinker for those who take a Sisyphus-centric view; in other words, those who isolate on The Myth Of Sisyphus and The Stranger as if Camus had written nothing else.

Basing itself on the entire trajectory of Camus’ works, (i.e. not fixating only on The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus), Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary moves beyond the typical understanding of Camus as an “absurdist” thinker. Instead, it indicates (1) how his major foil was nihilism, and (2) how he spent most of his career trying to explain why it was a mistake to stick him with the classification “absurdist” thinker. As such, the book offers a fruitful perspective that can serve as a watershed, opening new lines of Camusian inquiry

Albert Camus and the Rehabilitation of the Ordinary also breaks new ground in placing Camus in conversation with philosophers who helped philosophy move beyond the Cartesian paradigm which Camus inherited from his philosophical education. This allows contemporary readers to understand the limitations of Camus’s perspective, limitations which, not surprisingly, can be recognized by 21st century readers sensitive to shifts (a) in the philosophical landscape associated with Phenomenology, Pragmatism, and Ordinary Language Philosophy as well as (b) to newer ways of thinking associated with ecology. Both (a & b) intersect in emphasizing how humans are beings-in-the-world (philosophy), and how this world is our home ( the prefix eco derives from the Greek oikos meaning “home”).

Much 20th century philosophy and science thus remind us that we are not aliens, outsiders or strangers, but rather living beings in a living world. Camus, the book argues, never moved away from the Cartesian ‘Great Bifurcation” which separated humans (now ‘subjects”) from the world (now an “external” realm of “objects”). Such a starting point already has baked into it the notion that humans are like exiles or strangers to the world. Both 20th-century philosophy and science, as my book suggests, move in the direction of rehabilitating the ordinary.

In defense of this thesis, I suggest that a pivotal place should be granted to the (too-often overlooked) last completed work published by Camus, the short stories gathered in Exile and the Kingdom. It is in those stories that we can witness Camus working to rehabilitate the ordinary. Those stories also break with the early Camus for whom literature was but a vehicle for making philosophical ideas palatable. In Exile and the Kingdom literature comes into its own as an independent exploration of lived experience.