The aim of this paper is to propose a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness from Sartre. For it I will clarify and show the closeness of two ideas. The first of these is the so-called self-representational theory of consciousness, which holds that a mental state is conscious if and only if it represents itself in the right way. The second of these are the descriptions of consciousness from Sartre, which say that all consciousness is self-consciousness of itself, or more precisely: (...) every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. With the above, the phenomenal consciousness would be self-consciousness of itself and the self-consciousness of itself would be self-representation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness from Sartre. For it I will clarify and show the closeness of two ideas. The first of these is the so-called self-representational theory of consciousness, which holds that a mental state is conscious if and only if it represents itself in the right way. The second of these are the descriptions of consciousness from Sartre, which say that all consciousness is self-consciousness of itself, or more precisely: (...) every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. With the above, the phenomenal consciousness would be self-consciousness of itself and the self-consciousness of itself would be self-representation. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Sartre's phenomenological ontology in light of the pre-modern understanding of ‘transcendentals’ as universal properties and predicates of all determinate beings. Drawing on Sartre's transcendental account of nothingness in his early critique of Husserl as well as his discussion of ‘determination as negation’ in Being and Nothingness, this article argues that Sartre's universal predicate of ‘the not’ (le non) could be understood in a similar light to the medieval scholastic conception of transcendentals. But whereas the (...) scholastics saw the transcendental properties of oneness, truth, and goodness as reflections of God's divine perfections, Sartre's predicate of the ‘not’ operates as an atheistic transcendental which signifies the non-being of God – that God is not. By comparing Sartre's phenomenological ontology to medieval theological metaphysics, this article not only highlights the atheist underpinnings of Sartre's entire ontological schema in Being and Nothingness but also offers a new way of interpreting Sartre as a systematic transcendental metaphysician. (shrink)

Phenomenological discussions of sociality have long been concerned with the relations between the I, the You, and the We. Recently, dialogue between phenomenology and analytic philosophical work on collective intentionality has given rise to a corpus of literature oriented around the first-person plural 'we'. In this paper, I demonstrate how these dominant accounts of the 'we' are not exhaustive of first-person plural experiences as such. I achieve these aims by arguing for a phenomenological distinction between an experience of being part (...) of a 'we' compared to an experience of being part of an 'us'. To have a 'we-experience' there must be a plurality of (unified) subjects sharing in an experience together such that the experience has the phenomenal character of being ours. An 'us-experience', on the other hand, requires the experiential salience of an external 'Third' in a way which is constitutively significant. Drawing on Sartrean social ontology, I argue that the 'us' is distinct from the 'we' on three levels, all of which pertain to the constitutive and unifying role of the Third. I then outline two forms of us-experiences: (1) the experience of being grouped and (2) the experience of apprehending one's seriality. (shrink)

In this article I introduce a new reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's account of bad faith. The reading contrasts with previous accounts by denying that states of bad faith are exhausted by attitudes towards transcendence and facticity. Instead, I argue that bad faith can involve attitudes to many other aspects of the human being. I also respond to an argument which claims that affirmations of freedom are inconsistent with the motivations behind bad faith. The inconsistency is here resolved by demonstrating how (...) in bad faith we can still affirm a restricted version of freedom which avoids us acknowledging the unpleasant aspects of our full freedom. (shrink)

There is a growing discourse on “new sincerity,” and related terms like “quirky” and “metamodernism,” as a movement or sensibility in contemporary cinema developing from the late 1990s onward, exemplified by the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman. However, what this new concept means in the context of cinema has so far remained under-defined and requires further philosophical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by offering a reconceptualization of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist-phenomenological notions of good faith (...) and sincerity, which will be connected to developments in film and elaborated in relation to Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012). I propose, against Sartre's own preference for the problematic term “authenticity,” to understand sincerity as the reflective resumption of good faith's pre-reflective acceptance of human-reality. This conception of sincerity as reflective allows us to accurately understand the combination of self-awareness and affirmation that characterizes new sincerity cinema: its self-awareness does not serve the postmodernist strategy of endless self-ironization; instead, its portrayals affirm the meaningfulness of its filmic reality, while also being aware of film as a medium. An analysis of Frances Ha illustrates how this concept of sincerity might be seen to function both on the level of story world, characters and themes, and on that of narrative structure and audio-visual style, thereby showing how we can meaningfully speak of sincerity in and of film. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

According to a recent and prominent view, a ‘we-perspective’ arises out of a dyadic I-you relation involving a special form of reciprocity in which I relate to another as a you – as somebody who is also attending and addressing me. As important as this argument might be, one obvious limitation lies in that it typically applies to dyadic forms of ‘we’ which are bound to the here and now of face-to-face interactions between ‘ad hoc pairs of individuals’. Drawing inspiration (...) from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, I will argue that in order to trace a way out of this impasse, one needs to shift the theoretical focus from dyadic face-to-face (immediate) relations of reciprocity between I and You, self and other to ternary relations of ‘mediated reciprocity’ involving the figure and the functions of a third party (le tiers). (shrink)