In Being and Nothingness Sartre picks up diverging threads in the phenomenological tradition, weaves them together with ideas from Gestalt and behaviourist psychology, and asks: What is ...consciousness? What is its relationship to the body, to the external world, and to other minds? Sartre believes that the mind and its states are by-products of introspection, created in the act that purports to discover them. How does this happen? And how are we able to perceive ourselves as persons - physical objects with mental states? Sartre's Phenomenology reconstructs Sartre's answers to these crucial questions. On Sartre's view, consciousness originally apprehends itself in terms of what it is consciousness of, that is, as an activity of apprehending the world. David Reisman traces the path from this minimal form of self-consciousness to the perception of oneself as a full-blown person. Similar considerations apply to the perception of others. Reisman describes Sartre's account of the transition from one's original apprehension of another consciousness to the perception of other persons. An understanding of the various levels of self-apprehension and of the apprehension of others allows Reisman to penetrate the key ideas in Being and Nothingness, and to compare Sartre to analytic philosophers on fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind.
Anscombe distinguishes two notions of “self‐conscious”: the philosophical notion, which refers to the special form of awareness one has of oneself as oneself, and the ordinary notion, which we employ ...when we speak of “feeling self‐conscious before another”. My aim in this paper is to show that ordinary self‐consciousness cannot be understood in terms of either of the forms of intersubjective relation standardly acknowledged in the philosophical literature. It cannot be understood reductively, in terms of the psychological states of each subject nor can it be understood in terms of an irreducible second personal relation. Instead, I argue that in order to understand the phenomenological structure of ordinary self‐consciousness, we must rehabilitate Sartre's thought that when I am conscious of myself as being the object of another's gaze, I experience myself as being acted upon by them, in such a way that what I experience them as doing to me and what I experience myself as thereby undergoing are two aspects of an irreducible interpersonal transaction.
What would it be like to be privy to the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers? John Gerassi had just this opportunity; as a child, his mother and father were very close friends ...with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and the couple became for him like surrogate parents. Authorized by Sartre to write his biography, Gerassi conducted a long series of interviews between 1970 and 1974, which he has now edited to produce this revelatory and breathtaking portrait of one of the world's most famous intellectuals.
Through the interviews, with both their informalities and their tensions, Sartre's greater complexities emerge. In particular, we see Sartre wrestling with the apparent contradiction between his views on freedom and the influence of social conditions on our choices and actions. We also gain insight into his perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the disintegration of colonialism.
These conversations add an intimate dimension to Sartre's more abstract ideas. With remarkable rigor and intensity, they also provide a clear lens through which to view the major conflagrations of the past century.
Freedom and Agency in The Second Sex Langley, Harvey
European journal of philosophy,
March 2024, 2024-03-00, 20240301, Letnik:
32, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Successive generations of scholars have been hugely effective at challenging the once-common dismissal of Beauvoir's philosophy and the view that her work was a mere application of “Sartre's ...existentialism”. But while the originality and significance of Beauvoir's philosophical contributions are now widely acknowledged, there remains a series of foundational debates concerning The Second Sex and the precise nature of Beauvoir's intellectual relationship with Sartre. Although there is little consensus on this last point, it is increasingly common for scholars to distance Beauvoir's feminism from Sartre's early existentialism, especially his theory of existential freedom in Being and Nothingness. This partially derives from an enduring and widespread consensus that Sartre's early theory of freedom is fundamentally insensitive to the empirical realities of oppressive situations and therefore inimical to feminism.In this paper, I argue that the essence of Beauvoir's theory of freedom in The Second Sex is broadly consistent with Sartre's in Being and Nothingness, but that Beauvoir makes some major advances on Sartre by properly developing the relationship between freedom and power, resulting in a compelling existentialist framework for agency that significantly increases the viability of existentialism as a normative philosophy. I aim to demonstrate that recognising the foundational consistencies between Beauvoir's philosophy and Sartre's existentialism by no means detracts from Beauvoir's originality and intellectual independence, but rather champions it by allowing us to appreciate some of the most original and insightful features of The Second Sex and its role in the development of existentialism.
This work has the objective to reflect on the individual-society tension present in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre’s last great philosophical work, where the author tries to ...articulate its existentialist perspective with Marxist theory. Our analysis begins by reconstructing the context in which this work saw the light and then addresses the question of “sociality”, among other key notions linked to the Sartrean theory of practical ensembles. Finally, from this analysis we draw some conclusions in order to evaluate the reaches and limitations of the social ontology sketched in Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Sartre maintains that “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” Idiosyncratically, he also understands this “intentionality principle” to entail that what consciousness is “of” is ...necessarily distinct from it (or “outside of” it, or “transcendent to” it). Nonetheless, he also maintains that all consciousness is necessarily conscious of—or rather, “(of)”—itself in a non‐intentional (in his terms: “non‐positional/non‐thetic”) manner. Given that this non‐positional/thetic self‐consciousness is not intentional, it is evidently immune to the “difference” principle, but this is less clear with respect to self‐reflection (which Sartre simply calls “reflection”). It seems impossible for reflection to be “intentional” because intentionality entails difference—yet it also seems problematic to consider reflection “non‐intentional” because it then becomes difficult to distinguish reflection from non‐positional/thetic self‐consciousness as such (which is inherently “unreflective”). This can be called Sartre's “dilemma of reflection.” While Sartre seems to alternate between portraying reflection as intentional and as non‐intentional (it generally appears like the former), this paper argues that it should be conceived as both according to different respects. By piecing together various passages of Sartre's texts and drawing out their implications, Sartre can be shown to have the resources for an answer to his own dilemma.
...I was never passively listening to my mother-storyteller; my lively reactions were an integral part of the unfolding of her story. How to talk about the torrid sexual relationship between two ...lovers to children who were only eight or nine years old? I can still remember with an amused smile the narrative creativity of the storyteller; "every night," she would say, "a strong wind lifted Youmané's dress on her way back home." ...those frightened beings were often young women, like in the tale "Niantanta," which impressed me so much that I believe I have included it in every one of my novels in one form or another. The whole of their meaning resided in a sort of orgy of sound and a power of suggestion that gave them a rare intensity.
This issue has something of a symposium feel about it: a genuine conversation between some of our most eminent Sartre scholars, which, while clearly not planned this way, turns out to be rather ...appropriate in these socially distanced times. Whereas recent issues have testified to the breadth of Sartre’s work, the focus this time is on Sartre’s early philosophy, mainly, but not exclusively, on L’Etre et le néant.
Twenty-five years after his death, critics and academics, film-makers and journalists continue to argue over Sartre's legacy. But certain interpretations have congealed around his iconic text Nausea, ...tending to confine it within the framework provided by the later philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. This volume opens up the text to a range of new approaches within the fields of English and Comparative Literature, as well as Philosophy and French Studies, under the headings: 'Text', 'Context', and 'Intertext': the textual strategies at work within the novel; the literary, cultural and philosophical context of its production; and the intertextual web within which it is situated. This volume will interest a wide public of teachers, students and all those who want to reconsider Sartre's legacy in the twenty-first century.
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