The French existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean‐Paul Sartre are renowned philosophers of freedom. But what “existentialist freedom” is is a matter of disagreement amongst their interpreters and, some argue, between Beauvoir and Sartre themselves. Since the late 1980s several scholars have argued that a Sartrean conception of freedom cannot justify the ethics of existentialism, adequately account for situations of oppression, or serve feminist ends. On these readings, Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about freedom—making existentialist ethics, resistance to oppression, and feminism (...) coherently defensible. This article identifies four conceptions of freedom in order to clarify the questions of whether and how they disagreed, arguing that some incompatibilist readings of Sartre and Beauvoir conflate or confuse these conceptions in ways that render their conclusions unconvincing. However, there are stronger grounds on which to claim that Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about morality—and the conditions of its possibility. (shrink)

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one”, Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth (...) century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself. (shrink)

In this paper, Kate Kirkpatrick argues that the recent return to moral exemplars in exemplarist moral theory might benefit from engaging with existentialists' use of exemplars in two ways: first, by considering the role of negative exemplars and the power of emotions other than admiration in moral formation; and second, by considering objections to exemplarist education, in particular Simone de Beauvoir's objection that narrative exemplars often serve an ideological function and perpetuate oppressive ideals — especially (but not only) about women. (...) After situating this discussion in ancient and recent debates about the role of literary narratives in moral formation, Kirkpatrick outlines a moral perfectionist reading of Beauvoir and an objection to exemplarist moral theory's reliance on exemplars that “we” admire on the basis that “the admirable” often serves to promote the interests of the powerful rather than the flourishing of all human beings. Finally, while agreeing with this symposium's editors that efforts to improve our understanding of how to use narrative exemplars in educational settings are valuable, she asks how, given the force of the Beauvoirian objection, their criterion of “appropriate critical reflection” might be met. (shrink)

At the time when existentialism was a dominant intellectual and cultural force, a number of commentators observed that some of the language of existential philosophy, not least its interpretation of human existence in terms of nothingness, evoked the language of so-called mystical writers. This book takes on this observation and explores the evidence for the influence of mysticism on the philosophy of existentialism. It begins by delving into definitions of mysticism and existentialism and then traces the elements of mysticism present (...) in German and French thought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book goes on to make original contributions to the study of figures including Kierkegaard, Buber, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Sartre, Marcel, Camus, Weil, Bataille, Berdyaev, and Tillich, linking their existentialist philosophy back to some of the key concerns of the mystical tradition. Providing a unique insight into how these two areas have overlapped and interacted, this study is vital reading for any academic with an interest in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and religious studies. (shrink)

This article attempts to redress the neglect of Sartre's relationship to Augustine, putting forward a reading of the early Sartre as an atheist who appropriated concepts from Augustinian theology. In particular, it is argued, Sartre owes a debt to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. Sartre's portrait of human reality in _Being and Nothingness_ is bleak: consciousness is lack; self-knowledge is impossible; and to turn to the human other is to face the imprisonment of an objectifying gaze. But this has (...) recognizable antecedents in Augustine's account of the condition of human fallenness. The article, therefore, demonstrates the significant similarities between Sartre's ontology of human freedom and Augustine's ontology of human sin; and asks whether Sartre's project – as defined in _Existentialism Is a Humanism_ – 'to draw the full conclusions from a _consistently atheistic position_' – results in a vision of the world without God, but not without sin. It is proposed that this opens the possibility for a previously unexplored theological reading of Sartre's early work. (shrink)

Despite her reputation as the ‘Mother’ of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir is not usually heralded as a mother-friendly feminist. In The Second Sex, the passages dedicated to the female body—and especially the pregnant female body—have been dismissed as unfortunate expressions of internalized patriarchy or personal idiosyncrasy. By comparing Beauvoir’s later analysis of old age to aspects of the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood, this essay suggests that Beauvoir’s later work Old Age offers a rich untapped resource for understanding (...) her thinking on maternity. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is rarely discussed in the philosophy of religion. In 2009, however, Jerome Gellman broke the silence, publishing an article in which he argued that the source of Sartre’s atheism was neither philosophical nor existential, but mystical. Drawing from several of Sartre’s works – including Being and Nothingness, Words, and a 1943 review entitled ‘A New Mystic’ – I argue that there are strong biographical and philosophical reasons to disagree with Gellman’s conclusion that Sartre was a ‘mystical atheist’. Moreover, (...) I question the likelihood of drawing any definitive conclusions regarding the sources of Sartre’s ambiguous atheism. (shrink)

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three (...) types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and postcolonial discourse but also a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–19) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society. (shrink)

This article argues that analytic philosophy has a “convincingness deficit”; that proponents of the analytic method’s application to questions of theology must consider whether it is the best tool for the purpose at hand; and that phenomenology – in particular, Sartrean phenomenology – provides a useful methodological complement to the scholarly analysis of faith. After defining the convincingness deficit and what I take analytic theology to be, I defend phenomenology against the charge of “subjectivity” in order to argue that the (...) varied ends of theological discourse require varied means – means which include phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper explores the tension between the ethical and the political in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, with a particular focus on the domain of law. Some philosophers conclude that Levinas’ ethics constitute a critique of politics. But in his later writings it is clear that he does not wish to reject political rationality and its order. Rather, he criticizes the idea that only political rationality can answer political problems.

In his biography of Jean Genet, Sartre says his aim is ‘to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality’. Building on my reading of Being and Nothingness in Sartre on Sin, I examine the compatibility of Sartrean freedom and love in Saint Genet. Sartre’s account of Genet’s person is largely a loveless one in which there is no reciprocity, others are ‘empty shells’ and love is ‘only the lofty name which [Genet] gives to onanism’. I (...) use Saint Genet to suggest Genet’s lovelessness is the direct result of locating the totality of personhood in freedom. This location results in a lonely experience of subjectivity as ‘master, slave and merciless struggle’ – never lover or beloved, whether on the divine plane or the human. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the twentieth century's most prominent atheists. But his philosophy was informed by theological writers and themes in ways that have not previously been acknowledged. In Sartre and Theology, Kirkpatrick examines Sartre's philosophical formation and rarely discussed early work, demonstrating how, and which, theology shaped Sartre's thinking. She also shows that Sartre's philosophy - especially Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is A Humanism - contributed to several prominent twentieth-century theologies, examining Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Liberation theologians (...) rebuttals and appropriations of Sartre. -/- For philosophers, this work opens up an unmined vein of influence on Sartre's work which illuminates his conceptual divergences from the German phenomenological tradition. And for theologians, it offers insights into a theologically informed atheism which provoked responses from some of the twentieth-century's greatest theologians - an atheism from which we can still learn much today. (shrink)

Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's early, anti-humanist philosophy is indebted to the Christian doctrine of original sin. On the standard reading, Sartre's most fundamental and attractive idea is freedom: he wished to demonstrate the existence of human freedom, and did so by connecting consciousness with nothingness. Focusing on Being and Nothingness, Kate Kirkpatrick demonstrates that Sartre's concept of nothingness (le néant) has a Christian genealogy which has been overlooked in philosophical and theological discussions of (...) his work. Previous scholars have noted the resemblance between Sartre's and Augustine's ontologies: to name but one shared theme, both thinkers describe the human as the being through which nothingness enters the world. However, there has been no previous in-depth examination of this 'resemblance'. Using historical, exegetical, and conceptual methods, Kirkpatrick demonstrates that Sartre's intellectual formation prior to his discovery of phenomenology included theological elements-especially concerning the compatibility of freedom with sin and grace. -/- After outlining the French Augustinianisms by which Sartre's account of the human as 'between being and nothingness' was informed, Kirkpatrick offers a close reading of Being and Nothingness which shows that the psychological, epistemological, and ethical consequences of Sartre's le néant closely resemble the consequences of its theological predecessor; and that his account of freedom can be read as an anti-theodicy. Sartre on Sin illustrates that Sartre' s insights are valuable resources for contemporary hamartiology. (shrink)

Led by the conviction that Beauvoir's The Coming of Age (1970) has been overshadowed by The Second Sex for too long, this book sets out to redress that neglect and to bring Beauvoir's reflections on old age into dialogue with different perspectives and approaches in feminist philosophy. It does so superbly. Several secondary works on Beauvoir discuss The Coming of Age, including The Cambridge Companion to Beauvoir, Stella Stanford's How to Read Beauvoir, and (from a literary perspective) Oliver Davis's Age (...) Rage and Going Gently, but there is no similarly comprehensive treatment of Beauvoir's philosophy of age. [...]. (shrink)