20th century · 1913–1960
Who influenced Albert Camus?
Influences
The absurd: the world keeps silent, and we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Lev Shestov and Simone Weil. That is 3 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Photograph by United Press International, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Albert Camus?
Camus was born in French Algeria to a poor pied-noir family and studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. During the Second World War he joined the French Resistance and edited its clandestine newspaper Combat. He belonged to the left that opposed Stalin's totalitarianism, and in the Algerian War he argued for a pluralistic Algeria.
His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel and The Fall, and his thought helped found the philosophy of the absurd. Many count him among the existentialists, though he rejected the label all his life. In 1957, at 44, he became the second-youngest Nobel laureate in Literature and the first born in Africa.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Albert Camus?
3 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Lev Shestov 1866–1938
- Simone Weil 1909–1943
The line of teachers behind Albert Camus
The longest documented line of influence ending at Albert Camus runs 26 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- Max Stirner
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Lev Shestov
- Albert Camus
Two steps away from Albert Camus
Indirect influences
Contemporaries of Albert Camus
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Albert Camus, with no direct line between them.
- Wilfrid Sellars 1912–1989
- Roland Barthes 1915–1980
- J. L. Austin 1911–1960
- A. J. Ayer 1910–1989
- Donald Davidson 1917–2003
- Algirdas Julien Greimas 1917–1992
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
Albert Camus by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 3
- Direct followers
- 0
- Thinkers upstream
- 96
- Thinkers downstream
- 0
- Wikipedia languages
- 141 — #2 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Schools and lineages
Questions about Albert Camus
- Who influenced Albert Camus?
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Lev Shestov and Simone Weil.
- Who did Albert Camus influence?
- No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Albert Camus.
- When did Albert Camus live?
- 1913–1960. The map files Albert Camus under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Albert Camus card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Albert Camus in 141 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
- Antonio Gramsci 1891–1937