In his recent Immaterialism, Graham Harman develops a theory of social objects based on his object-oriented ontology. Whereas some of the more mainstream theories in the humanities would dissolve such objects into their material constituents or their various effects on others, object-oriented social theory theorizes them as inert, resilient entities with a private reality that exceeds their components and actions. Harman’s theory focuses on what social entities are qua objects, and consequently says little about their specificity as social objects. A (...) more complete social theory would also outline how human existence is to be understood in relation to a social world comprised of discrete and inert entities, as opposed to, for example, far more continuous material fields or networks of associations. We argue that an unexpected yet solid candidate for such an extension of object-oriented social theory already exists in Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of practico-inert being and group formation. We first outline Harman’s and Sartre’s respective ontologies of social objects, and then discuss how their many complementarities make the latter a suitable extension of the former. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Zahavi's Sartre-inspired combination of the experiential and narrative self entails an unnecessary duplication of selves. Sartre himself accused Husserl of the same mistake in The Transcendence of the Ego. He claims that Husserl's combination of the transcendental I and the Me is unnecessary, and that we can do without the first. I try to show that Sartre's critique of Husserl also applies to Zahavi. Sartre's critique is based on his idea of impersonal consciousness, which (...) I explain by comparing it to Armstrong's example of the long-distance truck-driver. Furthermore, I explicate how the alternative notion of self that Sartre proposes in the same work avoids unnecessary duplications of selves, and thereby evades further problems concerning how the two selves relate to one another. (shrink)

Throughout the history of analytic philosophy the notion of the ‘phenomenological fallacy’ originally formulated by Place, has been used to criticize reification of the mental. Although this fallacy was originally not used to criticize the phenomenological tradition, it has popped up recently in debates between analytic philosophers and phenomenologists. However, a study of the history of both traditions reveals that a polemical notion similar, if not identical, to the phenomenological fallacy can be found within the phenomenological tradition, namely Sartre’s ‘illusion (...) of immanence’. In this article, I will explicate these two polemical notions and place them in the context of their respective traditions. This will reveal that both notions must be understood as a criticism of a certain form of representationalism I will call ‘dual-world representationalism’. This deep-rooted similarity between the analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology, in turn, sheds a new light on current discussions between the two traditions. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the philosophical question of what it is like to experience an adventure. It draws from four works that discuss this question, namely Georg Simmel’s “The Adventure,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea,” de Beauvoir’s “Ethics of Ambiguity,” and Vladimir Jankélévitch’s “Adventure, Boredom, Seriousness.” From these works, three characteristics of adventurous experiences are drawn. The first is that adventure is something that can only exist in contrast with everyday life. The second is that adventure has a goal-directed structure. The (...) last is that adventures have a different structure in hindsight than they have in the moments that they are lived. These characteristics are used to shed new light on the desire for adventure and a meaningful life in contemporary society. (shrink)

In this article, I argue against a widespread misconception concerning the nature of things in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre’s conception of the nature of things concerns the idea that outside of consciousness a single undifferentiated mass of brute being exists which is divided into definitive things by consciousness. I propose a different reading of Sartre’s realism. Such a reading is based primarily on Nausea, Being and Nothingness and Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self states that, contra common conception, there is (...) no brute being outside of consciousness, but rather, a vast multitude of different things. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that Sartre’s notions of nothingness and “negatity” are not, as he presents it, primarily reactions to Hegel and Heidegger. Instead, they are a reaction to an ongoing struggle with Husserl’s notion of intentionality and related notions. I do this by comparing the criticism aimed at Husserl in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to that presented in his earlier work, The Imagination, where he discusses Husserl more elaborately. Furthermore, I compare his criticism to Husserl’s own criticism of (...) the “doctrine of immanent objects”, in order to show that Sartre’s notion of nothingness is a continuation of Husserl’s criticism, and that he turns Husserl’s own arguments against himself. (shrink)

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