The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre

The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre
Author: Jonathan Webber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2009-01-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134220677

Webber argues for a new interpretation of Sartrean existentialism. On this reading, Sartre is arguing that each person’s character consists in the projects they choose to pursue and that we are all already aware of this but prefer not to face it. Careful consideration of his existentialist writings shows this to be the unifying theme of his theories of consciousness, freedom, the self, bad faith, personal relationships, existential psychoanalysis, and the possibility of authenticity. Developing this account affords many insights into various aspects of his philosophy, not least concerning the origins, structure, and effects of bad faith and the resulting ethic of authenticity. This discussion makes clear the contributions that Sartre’s work can make to current debates over the objectivity of ethics and the psychology of agency, character, and selfhood. Written in an accessible style and illustrated with reference to Sartre’s fiction, this book should appeal to general readers and students as well as to specialists.

Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre
Author: Gary Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-09-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1474235344

Jean-Paul Sartre is an undisputed giant of twentieth-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism combined with his creative and artistic flair have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion. This substantial and meticulously researched biography is accessible, fast-paced, often amusing and at times deeply moving. Existentialism and Excess covers all the main events of Sartre's remarkable seventy-five-year life from his early years as a precocious brat devouring his grandfather's library, through his time as a brilliant student in Paris, his wilderness years as a provincial teacher-writer experimenting with mescaline, his World War II adventures as a POW and member of the resistance, his post-war politicization, his immense amphetamine fueled feats of writing productivity, his harem of women, his many travels and his final decline into blindness and old age. Along the way there are countless intriguing anecdotes, some amusing, some tragic, some controversial: his loathing of crustaceans and his belief that he was being pursued by a giant lobster, his escape from a POW camp, the bombing of his apartment, his influence on the May 1968 uprising and his many love affairs. Cox deftly moves from these episodes to discussing his intellectual development, his famous feuds with Aron, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, his encounters with other giant figures of his day: Roosevelt, Hemingway, Heidegger, John Huston, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev and Tito, and, above all, his long, complex and creative relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism and Excess also gives serious consideration to Sartre's ideas and many philosophical works, novels, stories, plays and biographies, revealing their intimate connection with his personal life. Cox has written an entertaining, thought-provoking and compulsive book, much like the man himself.

No Exit

No Exit
Author: Yoav Di-Capua
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2018-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 022649988X

It is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades—from the end of World War II until the late 1960s—existentialism’s most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia’s uncontested champion. In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world. He tells this story by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews. Tragically, the warm and hopeful relationships forged between Arab intellectuals, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others ended when, on the eve of the 1967 war, Sartre failed to embrace the Palestinian cause. Today, when the prospect of global ethical engagement seems to be slipping ever farther out of reach, No Exit provides a timely, humanistic account of the intellectual hopes, struggles, and victories that shaped the Arab experience of decolonization and a delightfully wide-ranging excavation of existentialism’s non-Western history.

Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 869
Release: 1992
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0671867806

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

The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre

The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 515
Release: 2003-05-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400076323

This unique selection presents the essential elements of Sartre's lifework -- organized systematically and made available in one volume for the first time in any language.

Existentialism and Sociology

Existentialism and Sociology
Author: Gila Hayim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351521160

Existentialism and Sociology (originally published under the title The Existential Sociology of Jean-Paul Sartre) is the first work to systematically and critically analyze the existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and to demonstrate their importance and connection to central sociological categories found in the theories of Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Mead, and others.Drawing also on sociological and Hegelian social thought, Hayim analyzes key existential concepts of negation, temporality, choice, anguish, and bad faith, and carefully situates them in the different relations of self to the other—relations of indifference and destruction, as well as relations of engagement and pledge. She joins the two orders of being—ontology and sociology—and establishes intellectual and ethical continuity between the phenomenology of Being and Nothingness, Sartre's momentous early work, and neglected sociological categories in his later works: Critique of Dialectical Reason and Notebooks for an Ethics.Hayim makes accessible to the social scientist a rich repertoire of existential motifs and perspectives on community and group interactions and their inextricable bond to the life practice of the individual. Distinguishing among social groups as different orders of social consciousness and organization, Hayim addresses issues of transcendence and inertia, leadership and authority, freedom and bondage, bureaucracy and control, and identifies Sartre's concept of the practico-inert as the radical center of our intersubjectivity today, and its threat to human intelligibility.The author contends that the massive language of a sociology of things instills in the human actor a feeling of helplessness and gross inferiority vis-a-vis the social world. She offers, in contrast, the existential emphasis on the importance of substituting live human experience for mechanistic processes of explanation, and of establishing

The Labyrinth

The Labyrinth
Author: Ben Argon
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1683357434

“Designed for the studious and dabblers alike” this unique graphic novel offers “an accessible primer on one of the 20th century’s weightiest thinkers” (Publishers Weekly). Life can often feel like a rat race. To make sense of it all, generations of truth seekers have turned to the works of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Now a fellow seeker shares a charming and accessible introduction to Sartre’s profound and complex ideas—told in cartoons. Ben Argon’s graphic novel about a pair of rats trapped in the labyrinth of existence humorously conveys the key ideas of Sartre’s existential philosophy. In addition, two Sartre scholars have contributed an introduction and afterword providing context and deeper insight.

Between Existentialism and Marxism

Between Existentialism and Marxism
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2025-01-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1804296171

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity of Sartre’s interests, since his deliberate attempt to wed his original existentialism to a rethought Marxism. A long and brilliant autobiographical interview, given to New Left Review in 1969, constitutes the best single overview of Sartre’s whole intellectual evolution. Three analytic texts on the US war in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the lessons of the May Revolt in France, define his political positions as a revolutionary socialist. Questions of philosophy and aesthetics are explored in essays on Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Tintoretto. Another section of the collection explores Sartre’s critical attitude to orthodox psychoanalysis as a therapy, and is accompanied by rejoinders from colleagues on his journal Les Temps Modernes. The volume concludes with a prolonged reflection on the nature and role of intellectuals and writers in advanced capitalism, and their relationship to the struggles of the exploited and oppressed classes. Between Existentialism and Marxism is an impressive demonstration of the breadth and vitality of Sartre's thought, and its capacity to respond to political and cultural changes in the contemporary world.

Existential Psychoanalysis

Existential Psychoanalysis
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Gateway Editions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1996-09-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780895267023

In Existential Psychoanalysis, Sartre criticizes modern psychology in general, and Freud's determinism in particular. His often brilliant analysis of these areas and his proposals for their correction indicate in what direction an existential psychoanalysis might be developed. Sartre does all this on the basis of his existential understanding of man, and his unshakeable conviction that the human being simply cannot be understood at all if we see in him only what our study of subhuman forms of life permits us to see, or if we reduce him to naturalistic or mechanical determinism, or in any other way take away from the man we try to study his ultimate freedom and individual responsibility. An incisive introduction by noted existential psychologist Rollo May guides readers through these challenging yet enlightening passages.