The aim of this article is to think about a current issue, the discourse of the Brazilian philosophical making, not worked in the content of Being and Nothingness. However, we think it is possible to bring up some of the themes discussed there, as well as Sartre's philosophical writing, to warn us about the pitfalls of this discourse, which is positioned as the opposite and better than the previous one, but which ends up reproducing what he (...) criticizes by remaining in an excluding dualism. Returning to the Sartrean perspective of thinking in terms of ambiguities, avoiding falling into both realism and idealism, balancing presence to oneself with presence to the world, seems us fundamental, even today, for a more complex discussion, which does not fall into false dilemmas. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about (...) to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (“existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century. The principal founder of existentialism, a political thinker and famous novelist and dramatist, his work has exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and cultural studies. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings is the first collection of Sartre's key philosophical writings and provides an indispensable resource for readers of his work. Stephen Priest's clear and helpful introductions make the volume an ideal companion to those coming to Sartre's writing (...) for the first time. (shrink)

First published in France in 1936 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the Ego was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional work, Nausea . The Transcendence of the Ego is the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here, as in many subsequent (...) writings, Sartre embraces Husserl's vision of phenomenology as the proper method for philosophy. But he argues that Husserl's conception of the self as an inner entity, 'behind' conscious experience is mistaken and phenomenologically unfounded. The Transcendence of the Ego offers a brilliant diagnosis of where Husserl went wrong, and a radical alternative account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness : the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career. This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. (shrink)

First published in France in 1936 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the Egowas one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional work, Nausea. The Transcendence of the Egois the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here, as in many subsequent writings, Sartre embraces (...) Husserl's vision of phenomenology as the proper method for philosophy. But he argues that Husserl's conception of the self as an inner entity, 'behind' conscious experience is mistaken and phenomenologically unfounded. The Transcendence of the Egooffers a brilliant diagnosis of where Husserl went wrong, and a radical alternative account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career. This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context.t of consciousness, situated in the world. This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career. This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. (shrink)

During the phony war that preceded the invasion of France, between late 1939 and the summer of 1940, the young Jean-Paul Sartre was stationed in his native Alsace as part of a meteorological unit. He used his considerable periods of spare time, between mundane duties like watching weather balloons, to make a series of notes on philosophy, literature, politics, history and autobiography that anticipate the themes of his later masterpieces, and often surpass them in literary verve and directness. These War (...) Diaries form a portrait of Sartre in his most intense and brilliant phase. With them the twentieth century's most remarkable and public philosopher has provided us with a fitting posthumous monument to his honest and creativity. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible (...) to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes. Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

A sign of Sartre’s belated "coming of age" in professional, English-speaking philosophical circles is the recent shift from exposition to dialogue as analytic authors regard his contribution to current Anglo-American philosophical discussion. One of the interests, not to say obsessions, of analysis has been the philosophy of mind. The literature is vast, and alternative positions have been charted in detail. It is a virtue of Professor Morris’ book that she has mastered a respectable portion of the analytic (...) terrain. Her treatment of Sartre is limited to the writings up to and including Being and Nothingness. The statement of the question is analytic, the response Sartrean. Her assessment of the exchange is that "the concept of a person to be found in Sartre’s early work is not only intelligible but significant. He has led us away from some of the idle considerations in much contemporary analytic discussion of persons qua perceivers and has offered important and probably correct solutions to some of the most pressing and central problems connected with persons considered as moral agents". Thus the standard criteria for reidentification of persons, viz., memory, character, and bodily continuity, are viewed in terms of accountability, thereby underscoring Sartre’s "new criterion of personal identity," fundamental project or ideal self. Crucial to her general thesis is the ambiguity of the "I" for Sartre. The term denotes the body-subject of conscious relations and possessor of physical properties, on the one hand, and a free unification of acts and experiences over time, on the other, like a melody synthesizing individual notes—a standard simile in nonsubstantial theories of the self. She argues that both aspects of the "I" are required to resolve the matter of accountability as we understand it. The question of other minds is raised in the context of Sartre’s claim that "there is nothing behind the body. The body is wholly ‘psychic'." This problematic assertion not only makes his concept of shame-consciousness appear less ad hoc but helps warrant, as well, her claim that he is leaning toward a physicalism "broad enough to include the intentional properties of consciousness". An indication that analysis may be heading in the same direction is taken as an added sign of Sartre’s relevance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Violence Is Not an Evil”Ambiguity and Violence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Early Philosophical WritingsAnn V. MurphyThe recent translation and compilation of several of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical essays from the 1940s shed new light on Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between ethics and violence. While these essays predate the publication of The Second Sex (1949) and do not concern themselves with the subject of feminism per se, (...) Beauvoir’s philosophy of violence as it is outlined in both “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (1944) and “An Eye for an Eye” (1948) speaks to one of the more thoroughgoing concerns in contemporary feminist philosophy; namely, the nature of the relation between corporeal vulnerability, violence, and ethics. Together with The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), these early essays probe the difficulties in moving from an ontology in which violence appears to be inexorable to the terrain of ethical prescription. This essay urges recognition of the continuing relevance of Beauvoir’s philosophy in relation to the renaissance of interest in the theme of vulnerability in contemporary feminist theory. I argue that Beauvoir’s philosophy provides one of the most sophisticated accounts to date of the ethical problems posed by the experiential ambiguities of violence, and that her legacy in this regard is as important and redemptive as ever. More precisely, I read Beauvoir’s early conception of ambiguity as the philosophical predecessor to contemporary deconstructive accounts of corporeal vulnerability.Discourse on the body has governed the evolution of feminist philosophy. Recently, however, the nature of the body under investigation has changed. Whereas previously the critique of the nature/culture distinction dominated [End Page 29] feminist debates regarding the social construction of sex and gender, recent feminist work has consolidated around another conceptual pairing; namely, vulnerability and aggression. In reference to Beauvoir’s philosophical corpus, this recent development is interesting. Her magnum opus, The Second Sex, has attracted more attention because of its centrality in the debates over the social construction of sex and gender, a debate that has dominated feminist philosophy for the last several decades. Indeed, many laud this text for being ahead of its time with regard to the acknowledgement that “one is not born a woman,” but rather becomes one. This essay argues that Beauvoir’s early texts are similarly prescient with regard to the current preoccupation with the philosophical themes of violence and vulnerability. By tracing the development of Beauvoir’s idea of ambiguity, I argue that her conception of the body as the site of both aggression and vulnerability both anticipates and continues to productively address the problem of how one moves from a descriptive ontology to the terrain of ethics. This is a movement that Beauvoir arguably theorized more rigorously than either Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Jean-Paul Sartre, neither of whom published such sustained philosophical work on ethics in his lifetime.1I. Ambiguity in Beauvoir’s Early WorkIn The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir’s reflections on ethics come from a resolutely secular, existentialist perspective. Beauvoir—like her contemporaries in French existential phenomenology—understood human existence to be essentially marked by failure. Importantly, this failure is not vicious; rather, it is the consequence of the fact that human freedom can only ever be determined in scenes of constraint. Despite her resistance to the universal aspirations of Kant’s ethics, Beauvoir’s understanding of subjectivity as failure is consonant with the Kantian rendering of the ethical agent as a being for whom reason does not infallibly determine the will; indeed, an agent for whom reason is necessarily undone by certain inclinations and contingencies.2 For Kant, it made no sense to speak of the will unless one was referring to a being that had the capacity to act in accord with reason but did not infallibly manage to do so. Hence, ethics is an issue for us precisely to the degree that we are capable of failure. In this sense, ambiguity and failure mark the human condition and our distance from the divine. Only a being whose existence is marked by this inadequacy would ponder right and wrong, would debate the nature of ethical atrocity and recovery, and would anguish over the... (shrink)

This paper proceeds from the premise that film can be educational in a broader sense than its current use in classrooms for illustrative purposes, and explores the idea that film might function as a form of education in itself. To investigate the phenomenon of film as education, it is necessary to first address a number of assumptions about film, the most important of which is its objective character under study. The objective study of film holds that the meaning of (...) film awaits its correct interpretation according to an informed viewer. I suggest that theoretical modes of interpretation in this vein really amount to attempts to control meaning via a particular lens, rather than allowing films to present meaning in necessarily ambiguous, and thus sometimes unsettling, ways. Situating film as the object of study in this way continues a tradition of empiricism or naturalism in thought that both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to critique as psychologism. Whilst no claim is made for reconceiving of Wittgenstein as phenomenologist, a dialogue between the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and the Phenomenology of Perception reveals sympathies in attempts made by both to overcome a metaphysics of the perceived or experienced object, thereby broadening the educational reach of film. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from the premise that film can be educational in a broader sense than its current use in classrooms for illustrative purposes, and explores the idea that film might function as a form of education in itself. To investigate the phenomenon of film as education, it is necessary to first address a number of assumptions about film, the most important of which is its objective character under study. The objective study of film holds that the meaning of (...) film awaits its correct interpretation according to an informed viewer. I suggest that theoretical modes of interpretation in this vein really amount to attempts to control meaning via a particular lens, rather than allowing films to present meaning in necessarily ambiguous, and thus sometimes unsettling, ways. Situating film as the object of study in this way continues a tradition of empiricism or naturalism in thought that both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to critique as psychologism. Whilst no claim is made for reconceiving of Wittgenstein as phenomenologist, a dialogue between the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and the Phenomenology of Perception reveals sympathies in attempts made by both to overcome a metaphysics of the perceived or experienced object, thereby broadening the educational reach of film. (shrink)

The 20th century is known as a period of awakening and radical movements in the history. New systems of thought emerged during this period. Some systems of thought expressed a direct return to man. The beginning of the return to man was set by S.Kierkegaard with his views related to existentialism. The emergence of existentialism as a philosophical system coincides with the period after the First World War. In this period, the loss of previous values, the problem of secularism, (...) and the failure of the Enlightenment philosophy to justify itself are among the main problems. Existentialism began to take shape in Germany and France at about the same time, and in a short time it spread to many parts of the world - Italy, Spain, Latin America, India, England, the United States, Japan, etc. spread to countries. In Russia, the school of existentialism was created by N. Berdyayev and L. Shestov, and the German existentialism was created by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. The prominent representatives of French existentialism are Gabriel Marcel (1899), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Simone de Bavoir (1908-1986) and Albert Camus (1913-1960). It was Jean-Paul Sartre who perfectly placed the idea of individual human freedom at the center of his work. There are two important points in Sartre's philosophy: existence in itself and existence for itself. Sartre writes that; what is generally called consciousness is individual. The purpose of consciousness is to make existence for us. This is the fundamental state of consciousness. The main issue that Sartre took into account is that it is impossible to look at the philosophical problems of the 20th century in the context of general concepts. According to the philosopher, the best existentialism is humanism. In addition to his philosophical novels, Sartre became famous for his existentialist philosophy, which he developed in a unique way. He was one of the thinkers who marked the 20th century with his formation of existential Marxism and his political activity. In the conditions of the Second World War, when the concept of humanity was questioned, the work "Being and Nothingness", which is original and intertwined with life in every way, explains the current state of humanity along with Sartre's philosophical ideas. (shrink)

There are positive and negative lessons from Sartre: - Taking up some of his ideas one may arrive at a better model of consciousness in the analytic philosophy of mind; representing some of his ideas within the language and the models of a functionalist theory of mind makes them more accessible and inte¬grates them into the wider picture. - Sartre, as any philosopher, errs at some points, I believe; but these errors may be instruc¬tive, especially in as much as they (...) mirror some errors in some current theories of consciousness. This paper, therefore, is not a piece of Sartre scholarship, but an attempt of a “friendly take¬over” of some ideas I ascribe to Sartre into current models in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for (...) Mark Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

It has been commonly argued that there are traces of Jean Paul Sartre on the philosophical system of his partner, Simone de Beauvoir. Some claim that Beauvoir was not original enough when constructing her system and developing her thoughts; according to some others, she even was not a philosopher. From the perspective of Beauvoir, she didn’t even consider herself as a philosopher but as an author. For her, to call somebody a philosopher, they should be like Spinoza, Hegel, or (...) Sartre who constructs a comprehensive philosophical system, loves philosophy, teaches philosophy, understands philosophy, and uses philosophy in their works. Given these criteria, Sartre was a philosopher for her and she admits that Sartre’s philosophy influenced her a lot. Furthermore, she clearly expresses that there was a mutual influence indeed, which means she also influenced Sartre, but her impacts on him were in terms of literature, not philosophy. To give an example, after writing his biography books, Sartre wrote The Words where the traces of Beauvoir can be seen quite easily. This point can also be derived from Sartre’s admittance that he got the clarity and truth in his works--especially when describing a gesture, analyzing a situation, or observing an incident--by means of Beauvoir’s meticulous style and rich experiences. Sartre also indicates that Beauvoir was a perfect complement and privileged reader for him.In this work, our primary focus will be on the details of the influence of Sartre on Beauvoir. Here, I have to point out that even though the title of this paper is determined as “The Impacts of Sartre on Beauvoir” indeed the word “benefit,” instead of “impact,” would do better for our purpose. It is because though Beauvoir was influenced from Sartre’s philosophical identity, when building her thoughts we must say she mostly “benefited” from Sartre’s philosophy. We can easily see the examples of this point in several contexts: first, in the notion of ambiguity, and second, in her analysis of the position of woman. Also, in her notion of “the other” which is a threat for the independence of an individual, she shares the same ideas with Sartre in her early writings, but later, she changed her direction and adopted a different view.If we examine the notion of Beauvoir’s “ambiguity,” though it has various meanings, what she means is that a person is a free and unique subject on the one hand; and on the other hand that person is an object for others. Here, Beauvoir benefits from Sartre’s existential types. She agrees with Sartre on the idea that human existence contains both being-in-itself and being-for-itself; however, she thinks that having these two types of being together in their existence leads to an ambiguity for human beings. Sartre sees humans as beings that are always in a relationship with the other. And in this relationship, when being-for-itselfsubmit to the other, it becomes an object for the other’s freedom. While being-for-itself perceives the other as subject, she, herself, becomes an object. This fact expresses an ambiguity for Beauvoir.Another issue we can associate with the notion of “ambiguity” is related to the relationship between self and the other, the relationship that relies on the confrontation of the consciousness of the self with the consciousness of the other. At this point, the “I” who identifies himself as an absolute being sees the other’s consciousness as a threat and acts like an enemy towards it. It is because the subject that was exposed to the perspective of the other becomes an object now and she loses her freedom due to the intervention of the other. The other makes her an unguarded being. Now, the subject is not an active being but the object of the other. Thus, due to these restraints of the other on the subject’s freedom, the subject must deny the hegemony of the other and get over the problem by making the other an object. Similar to Sartre, Beauvoir, too, sees the existence of the other or others as a danger for her own freedom at the beginning. She considers freedom in individualistic way and sees the others as barriers for her freedom. But later, she changes her stance, and begins to consider the other as a necessary condition for her own freedom.The last point I am going to focus on is the philosophical source of The Second Sex. One of her masterpieces, The Second Sex, in which she gives the explanation of the oppressions women face and established the principles of modern feminism, is about the women who represent “the other gender” due to fact that women are always identified in terms of the differences of their oppressors, men. In The Second Sex, she examines the essential features that make a woman a woman and at the end she comes up with the notion of “the other.” When reaching this notion, in order to show how she applied existentialist ideas of ontology and ethics, she says that men perceive themselves as “I” or “the subject” and women perceive themselves as “the other.” Beauvoir improves the claims of Sartre in The Second Sex in a unique way, and further put forwards that women are regarded as “the other” and men are called as “the subject.” At this point, if the other becomes a threat for the subject or “I,” then, it can be said that women, too, become a similar threat for men.Surely, there are other points that can be said about the impacts of Sartre on Beauvoir. We will also be examining those points as well as the above ones in this work. (shrink)

The 20th century is known as a period of awakening and radical movements in the history. New systems of thought emerged during this period. Some systems of thought expressed a direct return to man. The beginning of the return to man was set by S. Kierkegaard with his views related to existentialism. The emergence of existentialism as a philosophical system coincides with the period after the First World War. In this period, the loss of previous values, the problem of (...) secularism, and the failure of the Enlightenment philosophy to justify itself are among the main problems. Existentialism began to take shape in Germany and France at about the same time, and in a short time it spread to many parts of the world - Italy, Spain, Latin America, India, England, the United States, Japan, etc. spread to countries. In Russia, the school of existentialism was created by N. Berdyayev and L. Shestov, and the German existentialism was created by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. The prominent representatives of French existentialism are Gabriel Marcel (1899), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Simone de Bavoir (1908-1986) and Albert Camus (1913-1960). It was Jean-Paul Sartre who perfectly placed the idea of individual human freedom at the center of his work. There are two important points in Sartre's philosophy: existence in itself and existence for itself. Sartre writes that; what is generally called consciousness is individual. The purpose of consciousness is to make existence for us. This is the fundamental state of consciousness. The main issue that Sartre took into account is that it is impossible to look at the philosophical problems of the 20th century in the context of general concepts. According to the philosopher, the best existentialism is humanism. In addition to his philosophical novels, Sartre became famous for his existentialist philosophy, which he developed in a unique way. He was one of the thinkers who marked the 20th century with his formation of existential Marxism and his political activity. In the conditions of the Second World War, when the concept of humanity was questioned, the work "Being and Nothingness", which is original and intertwined with life in every way, explains the current state of humanity along with Sartre's philosophical ideas. (shrink)

Democracies Always in the Making develops Barbara Thayer-Bacon’s relational and pluralistic democratic theory, as well as translates that socio-political philosophical theory into educational theory and recommendations for school reform in American public schools. Democracy is a goal, an ideal which we must continually strive for that can guide us in our decision-making, as we continue to live in a world that is unpredictable, flawed, and limited in terms of its resources.

Does it seem that with each reported state cyberattack, there comes an announcement of discovery, an attribution to one of a handful of usual suspects, some threatening language suggesting imminent retribution, and then nothing more? Increased incidence of cyberattack makes its occurrence seem simultaneously rampant in terms of publicity and minimal in terms of threat of war. If rampant, how can repeated deployment by the same actors carry no punitive consequences? How is such audaciousness tolerated? For some, a cyberattack by (...) a state is an act of war. Its prevalence suggests there must be a void somewhere that facilitates its use without consequence. Others think state cyberattack is like other internet novelties: digital malfeasance, amounting to a nuisance that naturally follows from a digital‐based existence, particularly since non‐state actors are typically involved. Yet, state‐on‐state hostilities are historically perilous on a vast scale, and there is a multilateral system for regulating the use of force in the context of war. Acts of war, even when seeming minimal in impact, are not by‐products of a digital fad, and cyberattack is now described as far more than ‘nuisance’. If anywhere, the place for clarity on hostile state cyberoperations use should be accounted for in International Humanitarian Law. Yet, in its present form, it is ambiguous if not silent on the subject, suggesting that cyberattack currently presents an advantage to perpetrating states. Does this void or these ambiguities make cyberattacks more legally advantageous to states than traditional, kinetic weaponry? I examine whether existing IHL is sufficiently adaptable to state cyberoperations through a mixed legal and theoretical approach and conclude that they do. (shrink)

This dissertation interrogates the notions of selfhood, agency, and subjectivity in the autobiographical works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren (Soren) Kierkegaard, and Jacques Derrida, all of which are significantly under-researched in the philosophical literature. I show, in each case, that the autobiographical works have a significant philosophical core that deserves drawing out, particularly with relevance to the knot of problems surrounding the quaestio mihi factus sum—the question, enigma, or mystery that I am. I situate each work within (...) the context of the author's larger treatment of the same issues in the more “theoretical” works, and then proceed to show that the autobiographical works all present a slightly different or more advanced picture of things, which is in each case at least partially dependent upon the genre itself. In the case of Sartre, this amounts to a real balance between freedom and the force of circumstances in Les Mots (Words); for Nietzsche, the virtual effacement of all conscious activity in Ecce Homo. For Kierkegaard and Derrida, the primary difference is performative: they are doing something in their autobiographical texts that they are not elsewhere. Kierkegaard's On My Work as an Author is, as he says, a “deed” rather than a “work”; likewise, Derrida's Circonfession (Circumfession) is an attempt to enact an “event.” I further establish that there is a veritatem facere, a “making,”“doing,” or “performing” of the truth, in each autobiographical text—in the form of an integration of our past into our current situation (Sartre), an affirming of our fate (Nietzsche), a witnessing before God (Kierkegaard), and a testifying to our responsibility to the Other (Derrida). I conclude by reflecting on some of the more significant successes, failures, and problems inherent in these autobiographical projects, in light of philosophical reflection on the genre. (shrink)

One of the latest volumes in the "Modern Masters" series edited by Frank Kermode, this small, introductory study exhibits that admixture of philosophical acuity, wit, and style which we have come to associate with the work of Arthur Danto. That a thinker noted for his significant contributions to the analytic tradition should focus his attention on the prince of existentialists is itself something of a Wunder. That he does not approach Sartre like a silhouette-maker appraising an impressionist painting reveals (...) Danto’s own catholicity as well as the clarity and rigor of Sartre’s underlying insights and arguments. After acknowledging a professional debt to Sartre: "I have quarried Sartre’s work like a Barbarini over the years, taken fragments of his thought which I would never, I am certain, have been able to think of by myself," Danto employs a structural and synchronic approach to elucidate "the Sartrian system..., the most important and least accessible and most widely misappreciated of all that he has done." The elements of that system which Danto examines are five, treated in as many chapters. Characteristic of the book’s irenic spirit, each chapter bears two titles, one the canonized Sartrian term and the other Danto’s translation of the same into current analytic discourse. So we are offered: "Ambiguity: or, Language and Existence" ; "Nothingness: or, Consciousness and Ontology" ; "Engagement: or, Knowledge, Action, and the World" ; "Shame: or, The Problem of Other Minds" ; and "Anguish: or, Factual Beliefs and Moral Attitudes". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Picking Up the Pieces of a Shattered Culture:Abandoning Sartre for AquinasR. E. HouserI expect to die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. Then his successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.—Francis Cardinal George (2010)Here I propose to (...) present a feature of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas, his ethical doctrine of virtue, concentrating on the four cardinal virtues—justice, prudence or good practical judgment, courage, and temperance. Plato first selected them as the four premier virtues, but they go back at least to Homer, for whom wily Odysseus exemplified prudence, warlike Achilles courage, old Nestor justice, Penelope and Telemachus, Odysseus' wife and son, temperance. And I offer them as central to living the morally good life required to "rebuild civilization" in an America that so fair and judicious a man as Cardinal George could call a "ruined society." To see the need for Thomas's solution, we must begin with the problem. Now, all societies depend upon the deep and fundamental ideas of the most important thinkers, prophets and sages, saints, and yes, even philosophers. Their ideas "trickle down" to influence regular folk, like you and me, those who whose hard work actually makes a society thrive, or die. And when those fundamental ideas change, the moral principles of those who embrace those ideas change, and consequently their actions change, and as a result the wider society in which they live changes, for better or worse. Such effects can now be felt across America [End Page 135] by all; but most of us are unaware of the primary intellectual agents of these changes, since they operate at the level of fundamental ideas, not politics or business or day-to-day life. And often their originators have died before the ideas reach full cultural force. So, ignorance of history makes it difficult to deal with present problems caused by those ideas.My first conclusion will be that a major cause of the current coarsening of our culture is the group of ideas of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, even though most Americans have never heard of him, and most of those who recognize his name have not read his works carefully enough to see the connection. Why Sartre? In the honors program at my university, I had a bright young lady of Muslim heritage who had gone to a lycée, one of France's elite classical secondary schools. "Did you read the classics?" "Yes." Expecting Montaigne or Pascal, I asked, "Who?" Her answer: "Sartre." So let us begin with the theory and practice of Sartre and his long-time lover Simone Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex was an intellectual spark for the women's liberation movement. Then we turn to some real-life examples of Sartrean influence on ourselves and American culture. Finally, for the best remedy for non-Christian and Christian alike, I recommend Aquinas's doctrine of virtue, when taken in its full scope.Sartre's Ethics of Absolute FreedomIn 1946, the year I was born, Sartre gave a lecture to a meeting of French librarians, which became his most popular book, Existentialism is a Humanism. There he laid out the core of his thought about God, humans, and their ethical behavior. Here I arrange his main ideas in an order that facilitates comparison with Aquinas, beginning with his view of human ontology and proceeding to its impact on the four cardinal virtues.Human OntologySartre turned his back on the traditional metaphysical view that every creature is an individual substance defined by a nature or essence it has in common with all other things of that type. In his "first principle of existentialism," Sartre skips over other animate things, plants and animals, and compares humans to inanimate objects:Let us consider... a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept.... One cannot postulate a man who makes a paper-cutter but does not know what it is... (shrink)

Addiction: A Philosophical Approach CHAPTER ABSTRACTS “Introduction: Dismantling the Catchphrase” by Candice Shelby Shelby dismantles the catchphrase “disease of addiction.” The characterization of addiction as a disease permeates both research and treatment, but that understanding fails to get at the complexity involved in human addiction. Shelby introduces another way of thinking about addiction, one that implies that is properly understood neither as a disease nor merely as a choice, or set of choices. Addiction is a phenomenon emergent from a (...) complex dynamic system that is at once physical, psychological, social, and more. “A Philosophical Analysis of Addiction” by Candice Shelby Shelby brings much-needed clarity to the discourse surrounding the topic of addiction. Arguing that addiction can neither properly be understood as a disease nor as merely a set of choices, Shelby exposes the weaknesses of both approaches. She shows that addicted persons do not exhibit the elements characteristic of compulsion, nor does an account of addiction in terms of weakness of will, or irrational choosing, provide a satisfying explanation. Instead, by replacing traditional substance ontology with process ontology, and accepting the reality of emergent entities, a coherent account of persons, minds, and addiction can be provided. A fundamental philosophical shift is necessary to see that bodies, minds, values, and addictions are all part of the natural world. “Addiction at the Individual Level” by Candice Shelby Shelby discusses the most influential accounts of addiction as it is understood at the purely individual level. From hedonic theories to incentive sensitization, to habit theories of addiction, to behavioral theories and the ego depletion theory, Shelby considers a variety of approaches to understanding addiction in individuals, as framed in both psychological and in neuroscientific terms. She notes some important caveats that should be considered before accepting the research regarding addiction at the individual level, namely that the scanning studies that are so popularly used to characterize addiction in neurobiological terms are ambiguous, and rely on numerous assumptions that may be false, and that certainly mislead. Shelby provides much-needed critique of both disease and choices models as they characterize addiction at the individual level. “Addiction and the Local Environment” by Candice Shelby Shelby argues that human addiction cannot be understood without serious consideration of the individual’s local environment, her home and family. From the gestational environment to interactions with caregivers during post-natal development to the adult environment in which people become addicted, Shelby shows that no one becomes an addict in a vacuum. Stress is a major influence in the environment throughout life, and has serious consequences for addictive vulnerability. Genetic influences as well are important to addictive vulnerability, but genes always express in interaction with their environment. Social acceptance or rejection is another particularly important factor in the local environment with respect to both coming to be addicted and transitioning out of it. “The Relation Between Addiction and Culture” by Candice Shelby Shelby provides a groundbreaking analysis of the relation between addicts and the cultures that breed them. In this cultural critique, Shelby shows that addictions to certain substances have historically been both the solution to the problem of how to grow economies and control people, and a problem for economic productivity and controlling citizens. Not all cultures have even the concept of addiction, while others, such as the contemporary Western world, and the U.S. in particular, seem to foster it. Shelby shows that addiction is both a cultural construct and, from another way of thinking about it, the result of conditions created by particular cultures. Social inequities, alienation, driving capitalism, and in particular the power of pharmaceutical companies, all contribute to the spiraling endemic of addiction. “Addiction and Meaning” by Candice Shelby Shelby provides a unique argument that understanding how meanings work is essential to a complete analysis of addiction. Individuals experiencing addiction and those who care about and for them often utterly fail to communicate. This is because their respective systems of meanings come to be significantly different. Meanings are not, Shelby argues, best understood in the symbolic terms that characterized the theory of language in the 20th century, but are better apprehended as emotion-rich prototypes carved from repeated interaction with the world. Becoming addicted essentially changes one’s entire system of meanings. Requisite to transitioning out of addiction is a Gestalt-type shift in one’s system of meanings. This holistic way of understanding meanings also provides one level of explanation of what happens when an addict relapses. “The Phenomenology of Addiction and its Implications” by Candice Shelby One way of judging theories of addiction is by how well they capture the phenomenal descriptions that addicts give of their own experiences. Shelby considers variations on 5 basic patterns of addictive experience through the eyes of particular individuals who lived through addictive periods, and shows how even the most influential theories of addiction fail to capture all of them. She argues that an important implication of taking the details of individuals’ addictive stories seriously is that addiction must be understood as a personal phenomenon emergent from a particular complex dynamic system. As her theory of addiction would lead one to expect, no two addicts are the same, and no single-focus theory can explain why not. “Possibilities for Transitioning Out of Addiction” by Candice Shelby Shelby provides numerous strategies for transitioning out of addiction. Given that the vast majority of addiction treatment programs currently available are 12-step based and only successful about 5-8% of the time, it is essential that other approaches be undertaken. Shelby canvasses a variety of options for helping addicted individuals to make the transition out of their troubled pattern of thinking and behaving. From direct brain interventions to drugs to trauma therapy to exercise and nutrition to habit reformation to use of narrative and changing one’s social context as ways of redefining the self, Shelby shows that the possibilities for transitioning out of addiction are legion. Perhaps the best approach is to understand addiction treatment in terms of providing physical, psychological, and social tool kits. “Addiction Emerges from a Complex Dynamic System” by Candice Shelby Shelby considers whether there truly exists such a thing as “an addict” or “addictive thinking” in the universal sense. She concludes that within the context of disruptive substance use or repetitive engagement in certain activities, ordinary human cognitive biases and behavior patterns are categorized as addictive. Addiction, she argues, is best understood as an irreducible human reality, emergent from a sufficiently complex dynamic system (an organism with self-awareness, within a particular cultural milieu) that is both shaped by and contributes to the shaping of its environment. Attempts to simplify addiction into one or a few dimensions may create a solvable problem, but by doing so they fail to solve the real one. (shrink)

This is one of the best written and most comprehensive studies of the development of Sartre’s thought yet to appear in English, which is not to say that it covers every facet of his variegated career. Written by the former editor of Yale French Studies and current chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, it emphasizes Sartre’s literary works and thus belongs most properly in the category of literary criticism or the history of ideas. Still, (...) McMahon does not ignore Sartre’s philosophical writings. Indeed, he gives particular attention to The Critique of Dialectical Reason, a volume often avoided by authors who approach Sartre from a literary tradition. But the philosophic sources are usually consulted to explain or illustrate the literary, which provide the object of the author’s prime concern. McMahon underscores three concepts which measure Sartre’s intellectual growth, viz., freedom, love, and history. Regarding freedom, Sartre has "completed" the unfinished analyses of Being and Nothingness with their excessive individualism by his growing awareness that freedom is more than the ability to say "No" to the Other; it has a positive content and requires collective action to be maintained. Likewise, love is now conceived as a bond of promises which envisages the achievement of common projects. McMahon labels this rather cold-blooded concept "pragmatic love." Finally, history, which emerges as Sartre’s absolute, is now understood as a force conditioning men and limiting the availability of their choices. Sartre has come under the sway of Engels’ dictum: "Men make their history themselves, but they make it within a given milieu which conditions them." Sartre relies heavily upon the power of dialectic to keep individual choice afloat in a sea of historical forces. Whether or not he succeeds is a current question. McMahon believes that he does not. Because what he calls the "shift of emphasis" in Sartre’s thought from the individual to the social involves a growing interest in the sciences humaines, McMahon’s failure to consider Sartre’s political writings at any length is the chief disappointment of this excellent study. And then there is that stepchild of Sartriana, Existentialism is a Humanism. Following Cumming and others, McMahon chooses to ignore this essay, probably because Sartre himself has repudiated it. But if anyone is to portray Sartre "warts and all," and McMahon does not hesitate to expose the blemishes, then the reckless and inconsistent statements of this short lecture are most revealing. They indicate the freewheeling motions of a "shift" underway. Each chapter is followed by a short but helpful discussion of related themes and works. To capture the world of Jean-Paul Sartre is a most ambitious project. McMahon has met this challenge with insight and style.—T. R. F. (shrink)

In his reflections on action in Being and Nothingness, Sartre goes to the heart of what it is to be human. Our free actions are not the consequence of ouridentity, they are its foundation. As human beings we go beyond who we are towards a freely chosen future self. Human identity is ambiguous because consciousness simultaneously accepts and sees beyond the identity it discovers; there is an internal disintegration which distances us from ourselves. The intentionality of consciousness means that we (...) are constituted not by an objective presence but by a “presence to” our identity. Personhood is established only when we select certain values and allow them to shape our identity and guide our actions. As “being-for-itself” we go beyond the present and project ourselves towards an identity that does not yet exist, thus creating ourselves through our freedom, through our concrete choices. This article pays careful attention to Sartre’s understanding of consciousness, selfconsciousness, and “selfness,” before drawing some conclusions about the role of human freedom in the construction of identity. (shrink)

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

The Transcendence of the Ego may be regarded as a turning-point in the philosophical development of Jean-Paul Sartre. Prior to the writing of this essay, published in France in 1937, Sartre had been intimately acquainted with the phenomenological movement which originated in Germany with Edmund Husserl. It is a fundamental tenet of Husserl, the notion of a transcendent ego, which is here attacked by Sartre. This disagreement with Husserl has great importance for Sartre and facilitated the transition from phenomenology (...) to the doctrine of Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Volume 26, Issue 1, March 2023, Page 86-90.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy. In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness , Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented (...) here for the first time in English, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works. Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States. With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , and The Freud Scenario , both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in post-war (...) thought and literature. In _What is Literature?_ Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of literature, exploring why we read, and why we write. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in post-war (...) thought and literature. In What is Literature? Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of literature, exploring why we read, and why we write. (shrink)

"A driving force in all Sartre's writing is his serious desire to change the life of his reader." -- Iris Murdoch.

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues that (...) emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its proper (...) setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues that (...) emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

'Search for a Method' is a separate and introductory essay published together with 'Critique of Dialectical Reason'.

‘I should like to show here that the Ego is neither formally or materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world.’ _Jean-Paul Sartre _ _The Transcendence of the Ego_ is one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications and essential for understanding the trajectory of his work as a whole. When it first appeared in France in 1937 Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in a provincial French town. Attacking prevailing philosophical theories head on, (...) Sartre offers a brilliant and radical account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. He introduces many of the themes central to his major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, and anguish. This translation includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. _Jean-Paul Sartre_. The foremost French thinker and writer of the early post-war years. His books, which include _Being and Nothingness, Nausea, The Age of Reason _and _No Exit_ have exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and drama. __. (shrink)

‘I should like to show here that the Ego is neither formally or materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world.’ _Jean-Paul Sartre _ _The Transcendence of the Ego_ is one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications and essential for understanding the trajectory of his work as a whole. When it first appeared in France in 1937 Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in a provincial French town. Attacking prevailing philosophical theories head on, (...) Sartre offers a brilliant and radical account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. He introduces many of the themes central to his major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, and anguish. This translation includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. _Jean-Paul Sartre_. The foremost French thinker and writer of the early post-war years. His books, which include _Being and Nothingness, Nausea, The Age of Reason _and _No Exit_ have exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and drama. __. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues that (...) emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “The Look”.

‘No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there. It is in this fact that we find the distinction between an image and a perception.' - Jean-Paul Sartre L’Imagination was published in 1936 when Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty years old. Long out of print, this is the first English translation in many years. The Imagination is Sartre’s first full philosophical work, presenting some of the basic arguments (...) concerning phenomenology, consciousness and intentionality that were to later appear in his master works and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy. Sartre begins by criticising philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of ‘mental images’ in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capacities of consciousness. He then reviews psychological theories of the imagination, including a fascinating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson. Sartre argues that the ‘classical conception’ is fundamentally flawed because it begins by conceiving of the imagination as being like perception and then seeks, in vain, to re-establish the difference between the two. Sartre concludes with an important chapter on Husserl’s theory of the imagination which, despite sharing the flaws of earlier approaches, signals a new phenomenological way forward in understanding the imagination. The Imagination is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. This new translation includes a helpful historical and philosophical introduction by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Also included is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important review of L’Imagination upon its publication in French in 1936. Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. (shrink)

‘A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.’ This was how Jean-Paul Sartre characterized himself at the end of his autobiographical study, Words. And Bernard-Henri Lévy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate. His thinking was essentially a tumultuous dialogue with his whole age and himself. He learned from (...) Gide the art of freedom, and how to experiment with inherited fictional forms. He was a fellow-traveller of communism, and yet his relations with the Party were deeply ambiguous. He was fascinated by Freud but trenchantly critical of psychoanalysis. Beneath Sartre’s complex and ever-mutating political commitments, Lévy detects a polarity between anarchic individualism on the one hand, and a longing for absolute community that brought him close to totalitarianism on the other. Lévy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century’s catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings. (shrink)

Postmodernism has been criticized as failing to offer, on the one hand, authoritative explanations for social phenomena that might provide a scientific basis for policy formation or, on the other, the philosophical justification for emancipatory work – its radical scepticism about claims to knowledge leaving its advocates, including many nurses, with little scope to transform oppressive social and political regimes. Various approaches to this important problem have been offered, both philosophical and mediodological. Some critical theorists have rejected certain (...) aspects of postmodernism as dangerous and distracting. Some more accommodating solutions are troubled by unacknowledged inconsistencies. Others embrace post‐modernism's unavoidable ambiguity (towards the Enlightenment for instance) with a lighter heart. In this paper I will review some of the criticism of postmodernism and some proposed solutions to these problems. Using recent research into the impact of managerialism on nursing within the UK National Health Service as an example and drawing on deconstructive literary theory, I conclude by accepting a rhetorical agonistics of undecidability. I take postmodernism as a mandate for causing trouble for those groups who are currently having their say and whose version of truth and rationality has achieved domination over others. I do not take postmodernism as a place from which to champion the cause or privilege the view of any particular group. (shrink)

Phenomenological studies of human experience are a vital component of caring professions such as counseling and nursing, and qualitative research has had increasing acceptance in American psychology. At the same time, the debate continues over whether phenomenology is legitimate science, and whether qualitative approaches carry any empirical validity. Ashworth and Chung’s Phenomenology and Psychological Science places phenomenology firmly in the context of psychological tradition. And to dispel the basic misconceptions surrounding this field, the editors and their seven collaborators trace the (...) evolution of phenomenological philosophy (including the work of Sartre and Heidegger) and its parallel impact on psychological science, revealing key points of compatibility: -The phenomenological roots of mainstream psychology -Controversies within phenomenology on the nature of consciousness -Existentialist currents in contemporary psychology -The value of qualitative methods in science-based practice -Applications of phenomenology in case conceptualization and therapy -Possibilities for qualitative-based research. The unique presentation of its subject makes this volume a source of considerable interest for readers involved in theoretical and historical psychology. It will also prove to be important reading for the professional or advanced student concerned with the search for meaning that unites philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

This is an extract2 from “Une défaite,” an unfinished novel which, according to Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre wrote in 1927. Apparently, Sartre was inspired by Charles Andler 's biography of Nietzsche and the triangular relationship of Nietzsche, Wagner and Cosima Wagner. The latter, Franz Liszt's daughter, was initially married to Hans von Bülow with whom she had two daughters, and then she married Wagner with whom she had two more daughters. Nietzsche admired her greatly. Sartre became fascinated by this ambiguous, (...) complex and conflictual triangle. Sartre also identified with Nietzsche and “the destiny of the solitary man.” The portagonist, Frédéric, who is one year older than Sartre, is also an ironic self-portrait of Sartre, while Cosima is a prototype for Anny in Nausea; both are modelled on Simone Jollivet. Cosima plays both mother and sister to Frédéric. The triangular relationship is often repeated in Sartre's affective existence. The fairy tale is the best written chapter in the novel. (shrink)