Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir's death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life's work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir's personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir's philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir's philosophy (...) written since her death. (shrink)

" Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?

Despite the advances wrought in recent years by recuperative readings of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's views on motherhood and mothering remain under‐appropriated when it comes to both feminist metaphysics and feminist political priorities. In our radically anti‐essentialist era, we are inclined take for granted that gender is a social construct, potentially oppressive when it's understood as a biological given but potentially liberating when its fundamental arbitrariness and infinite malleability are appreciated. Though Beauvoir is in no way a gender (...) essentialist, in the current theoretical atmosphere her insistence on the importance of physiology is more critical than ever. Under conditions in which women are told everywhere they turn that they are to gauge their worth as human beings according to the way their bodies look and work (with special emphasis on thinness and fertility), Beauvoir's reasons for emphasizing the fraught nature of pregnancy and motherhood can help us understand our continuing confusion over what it means to be a woman. (shrink)

The link is to an expanded, English version of this essay.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities by Debra B. Bergoffen, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ by Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir by Karen VintgesNancy BauerDebra B. Bergoffen. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities. Albany: (...) State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. x + 250. Cloth, $54.50.Eva Lundgren-Gothlin. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996. Pp. xii + 329. Paper, $19.95.Margaret A. Simons. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xx + 263. Cloth, $25.95.Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 202. Paper, $19.95.Anyone who is seriously interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy must contend sooner or later with the fact that she denied, repeatedly and vehemently throughout her lifetime, that she was a philosopher. Of course, a certain species of Beauvoir-detractor will be tempted to take these denials at face value, especially since they almost always went hand in hand with Beauvoir’s plausible-sounding [End Page 688] declarations that anything philosophical about her work could be traced to the thinking of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre, who, she underscored, was the “real” philosopher in their relationship. But the very strength and frequency of her abjurations of the title of philosopher is a sign that, like Freud, Beauvoir (who wrote several straightforwardly philosophical essays, including the monograph-length Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cınéas) was motivated not so much by modesty or self-abnegation but by a desire to distance herself from what counted, at least in the middle of this century, as philosophy.For most of the past 50 years, English-speaking readers of Beauvoir have simply accepted her portrayal of her relationship to philosophy. On the ordinary view, The Second Sex, while an important historical touchstone for “feminist theory” is not, or not quite, a philosophical piece of writing, and those of her publications that merit that title are mere apologetics for Sartrean existentialism. But in the years since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 allowed for the release of her voluminous and revealing letters to Sartre, more and more feminist philosophers have been taking a second look at The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s other essays and fiction as they try to engage productively both with non-academic feminist work and with the philosophical mainstream. As a result, the difficult question of just how to assess Beauvoir’s relationship both to philosophy in general and to Sartre in particular has become pressing and is at the center of the four books under review here.The authors of these books are each committed, in their own sometimes strikingly different ways, to two theses: first, that to understand Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy one must study her appropriations of the work of philosophers other than just Sartre and, second, that at the heart of Beauvoir’s enterprise in all of her work is a desire to think about how to create and sustain reciprocity between an existentially committed self and an equally autonomous other.The most historically oriented and, on my view, meticulous exploration of Beauvoir’s relationship to her philosophical influences is Lundgren-Gothlin’s superb Sex and Exıstence, which chronicles Beauvoir’s indebtedness to and interest in, especially, Hegel and Marx. Lundgren-Gothlin, a philosophically trained Swedish intellectual historian, shows decisively that one cannot make philosophical sense of The Second Sex as long as one reduces its philosophical dimension to boilerplate Sartreanism. Indeed, given Sartre’s antipathy toward Marx and his ambivalence about Hegel in Beıng and Nothingness, Lundgren-Gothlin’s work raises serious questions about the extent to which Beauvoir’s considered views in The Second Sex are even compatible with those of the early... (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex_ is the most important work of feminist philosophy ever published and one of the great texts of the Twentieth century. Renowned for introducing the theory of woman as the ‘Other’ it is a widely-studied text that continues to exert profound influence on feminist thought. _The Routledge Guidebook to De Beauvoir and The Second Sex_ introduces and assesses: De Beauvoir’s life and the background of The Second Sex The ideas and arguments of The Second Sex (...) De Beauvoir’s continuing importance to feminist theory and philosophy This book is essential reading for all students of feminism, gender studies, philosophy, and literary studies and ideal for anyone reading de Beauvoir’s classic work for the first time. (shrink)

4. Giving Voice: Beauvoir's Legacy in Two Perspectives.

In this paper I attempt to further the case, made in recent years by Eva Gothlin, that readers interested in a philosophical return to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex have good reason to heed Beauvoir's appropriation of central concepts from Heidegger's Being and Time. I speculate about why readers have been hesitant to acknowledge Heidegger's influence on Beauvoir and show that her infrequent though, I argue, important use of the Heideggarian neologism Mitsein in The Second Sex makes inadequate sense (...) apart from an appreciation of the fundamental role played by her appropriation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic in that book. I suggest a way to square Beauvoir's Hegelian claim that human beings are fundamentally at odds with one another with her Heideggerian view that we are also all ontologically with one another. Finally, I sketch out a way of interpreting Beauvoir's employment of certain concepts from Hegel and Heidegger in the service of understanding, hence beginning to overcome, women's oppression. (shrink)

Nancy Bauer's How to do things with Pornography is a difficult to review book. It sits in a somewhat liminal location somewhere between monograph and thematic collection. Bauer takes the reader on an intellectual journey that crosses a number of philosophical sub-disciplines but also moves between philosophical writing for a general audience and more technical writing exploring the same themes.

This article is a response to Nancy Bauer's How To Do Things with Pornography. The main argument of the book is presented and evaluated. In particular, Bauer's criticisms of Catharine MacKinnon's work on pornography are considered and a defense of MacKinnon's views offered.

Bioethics needs an expanded moral vision. It is now time for bioethics to take full account of the problems of health disparities and structural injustice that are made newly urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change. Nancy M. P. King, Gail E. Henderson, and Larry R. Churchill make the case for a more social understanding and application of justice, a deeper humility in assessing expertise in bioethics consulting, a broader and more relevant research agenda, and (...) greater appreciation of the profound health implications of global warming. (shrink)

How the new conspiracists are undermining democracy—and what can be done about it Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new—conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, how it undermines democracy, and what needs to be (...) done to resist it. (shrink)

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment (...) and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the 'I' and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a 'society of spectacle' nor via some form of 'authenticity'. (shrink)

Targeting injustices that cut across borders, they are making the scale of justice an object of explicit struggle.Inspired by these efforts, Nancy Fraser asks: ...

Most traditional accounts of Aristotle's theory of ethical education neglect its cognitive aspects. This book asserts that, in Aristotle's view, excellence of character comprises both the sentiments and practical reason. Sherman focuses particularly on four aspects of practical reason as they relate to character: moral perception, choicemaking, collaboration, and the development of those capacities in moral education. Throughout the book, she is sensitive to contemporary moral debates, and indicates the extent to which Aristotle's account of practical reason provides an alternative (...) to theories of impartial reason. (shrink)

The last and most poignant of these essays is The Intruder, Nancys philosophical meditation on his heart transplant.

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy’s philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “making,” and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the “making” that characterizes the very process of production (...) and thereby the structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. In this collection of writings on images and visual art, the author explores this through an extraordinary range of references.

This work examines the concept of trust in the light of virtue theory, and takes our responsibility to be trustworthy as central. Rather than thinking of trust as risk-taking, Potter views it as equally a matter of responsibility-taking. Her work illustrates that relations of trust are never independent from considerations of power, and that asking ourselves what we can do to be trustworthy allows us to move beyond adversarial trust relationships and toward a more democratic, just, and peaceful society.

What does it mean to think critically about politics at a time when inequality is increasing worldwide, when struggles for the recognition of difference are eclipsing struggles for social equality, and when we lack any credible vision of an alternative to the present order? Philosopher Nancy Fraser claims that the key is to overcome the false oppositions of "postsocialist" commonsense. Refuting the view that we must choose between "the politics of recognition" and the "politics of redistribution," Fraser argues for (...) an integrative approach that encompasses the best aspects of both. (shrink)

Heft 1. Über Intention, reine Absicht und Wahrhaftigkeit.--Heft 2. Von der Ehe.--Heft 3. Erlaubtes und verbotenes Gut.--Heft 4. Vom Gottvertrauen.

Engages and extends the feminist philosopher Lorraine Code's groundbreaking work on epistemology and ethics.

Until recently, struggles for justice proceeded against the background of a taken-for-granted frame: the bounded territorial state. With that "Westphalian" picture of political space assumed by default, the scope of justice was rarely subject to open dispute. Today, however, human-rights activists and international feminists join critics of structural adjustment and the World Trade Organization in challenging the view that justice can only be a domestic relation among fellow citizens. Targeting injustices that cut across borders, they are making the scale of (...) justice an object of explicit struggle. Inspired by these efforts, Nancy Fraser asks: What is the proper frame for theorizing justice? Faced with a plurality of competing scales, how do we know which one is truly just? In exploring these questions, Fraser revises her widely discussed theory of redistribution and recognition. She introduces a third, "political" dimension of justice—representation—and elaborates a new, reflexive type of critical theory that foregrounds injustices of "misframing." Engaging with thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt, she envisions a "postwestphalian" mapping of political space that accommodates transnational solidarity, transborder publicity, and democratic frame-setting, as well as emancipatory projects that cross borders. The result is a sustained reflection on who should count with respect to what in a globalizing world. (shrink)