Rethinking Existentialism, by WebberJonathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 229.

Many philosopers and social theorists pursue the notion that recognition is a fruitful framework for engaging with a social analysis of moral and political life, and – more critically – that the failure of recognition is a feature of alienation. This article argues that the thrust of these arguments can be properly attuned by deploying a dual model of recognition that draws especially on Sartre’s work. Where there is struggle for recognition between subjects, the object of struggle is not the (...) recognition of identity, or even of difference, but the recognition of non-identity. The claim will be that this practical attitude of recognition designates inter-subjective attitudes that can institute normative practices whereby agents’ claims are motivated by the epistemic virtue of non-identity. (shrink)

It is often said that to love someone we must love her for her own sake. But what does this mean? Various answers have been offered up by philosophers. Alan Soble's ‘aggregate’ view of identity focuses on properties of the beloved as key to understanding love's basis and, in a less direct way, its object. This view does not give us a clear distinction between persons and properties. David Velleman's view makes this distinction more clearly but creates a gap between (...) properties and personhood. Jean-Paul Sartre's view which emphasizes embodiment, addresses the main deficiencies of both of these former views. (shrink)

Human freedom was Jean-Paul Sartre’s central philosophical preoccupation throughout his career. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the cornerstone of his moral and political thought, Being and Nothingness, contains an extensive and subtle account of the metaphysical freedom that he considered fundamental to the kind of existence that humans have. Although rooted in phenomenology, Sartre’s account of freedom draws very little on analysis of the experience of freedom itself. It is rather based on a general phenomenological account of perceptual experience (...) and the motivation of action. The result is one of the most sophisticated portrayals of freedom in Western philosophical literature. It is certainly the most detailed account of freedom given by any of those philosophers who made the description of experience their central philosophical method. This claim is more usually made for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of freedom, which he presents in critical dialogue with Sartre’s, but as we will see his account stops short of a full phenomenology of agency and owes its plausibility and popularity in part to its author having asked one question too few. (shrink)