PERSON

William Barrett

The philosopher who carried existentialism across the Atlantic and argued, decades before AI could do anything impressive, that a civilization built on the rational definition of the human would eventually produce a machine that embodied it—and force the civilization to choose what it had left out.

William Barrett arrived in American philosophy at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right role. He was not the most systematic of the existentialist philosophers, nor the most original. He was something rarer: the one who could translate. His 1958 masterwork Irrational Man carried Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus across the Atlantic and across the cultural gap between European phenomenology and American pragmatism, making legible—for the first time to a broad reading public—what the existentialists had actually said about the predicament of modern consciousness. Barrett’s central argument, developed across Irrational Man, The Illusion of Technique, and Death of the Soul, was that Western rationalism had performed a slow amputation on the idea of the human. Beginning with Descartes’s separation of thinking substance from bodied existence, the tradition progressively narrowed its definition of the human until only the logical faculties remained—the parts that could be formalized,

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