Online research in philosophy

Sartre's concept of ‘non-thetic awareness’ must be understood as equivalent to the concept of ‘nonconceptual content’ currently discussed in anglophone epistemology and philosophy of mind, since it could not otherwise play the role in the structure of ‘bad faith’, or self-deception, that Sartre ascribes to it. This understanding of the term makes sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Sartre's early philosophy, and has implications for understanding certain areas of his thought.

It is argued that in beginning ``being and nothingness'' with the absolute ontological distinction between the for-itself (pure nothingness) and the in-itself (pure being), sartre makes it impossible to understand how the phenomenological account of experience which comes later in the work could be correct. attention is paid almost entirely to the critique of sartre implicit in the chapter of merleau-ponty's ``phenomenology of perception'' titled 'the cogito'. merleau-ponty's divergence from sartre is seen to center around his critique of sartre on the nature of the in-itself, the world, and the pre-reflective 'cogito'.

Sartre's concept of ‘non-thetic awareness’ must be understood as equivalent to the concept of ‘nonconceptual content’ currently discussed in anglophone epistemology and philosophy of mind, since it could not otherwise play the role in the structure of ‘bad faith’, or self-deception, that Sartre ascribes to it. This understanding of the term makes sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Sartre's early philosophy, and has implications for understanding certain areas of his thought.

Existentialism, by A. Macintyre.--Sartre the philosopher, by S. Hampshire.--The phenomenological philosophy in France, by I.W. Alexander.--Imagination, by H. Ishiguro.--Authenticity and obligation, by F.A. Olafson.--Pessimism and optimism in Sartre's thought, by F. Jeanson.--Sartre as critic, by H. Wardman.--Sartre's literary criticism, by O. Hahn.--Sartre as a playwright: The flies and Dirty hands, by W. Kaufmann.--Sartre as dramatist, by D. Bradby.--The existentialist rediscovery of Hegel and Marx, by G.L. Kline.--Sartre's ideal of social unity, by H.R. Burkel.--Praxis and dialectic in Sartre's critique, by A. Manser.--Sartre and the humanist tradition in sociology, by M.A. and D. Weinstein.--Bibliography (p. [387]-390).

Sartre's theory of the imagination is important both as an alternative to the idea that the imagination consists of images contained somehow in the mind - the "illusion of immanence" — and as an early formulation of Sartre's conception of consciousness. In this paper I defend Sartre's theory of imaginative consciousness against some of its critics. I show how difficulties with his theory parallel a perennial problem in Sartre-interpretation, that of understanding how consciousness can negate its past and posit possibilities beyond the facticity of its situation. In this short essay I will not provide a detailed exposition of Sartre's theory of the imagination. Rather, I provide the basis of an interpretation of this theory that emphasizes the role that the past plays in imaginative consciousness.

Sartre's notion of pre-reflective consciousness can be summoned to offer a general challenge to contemporary functionalist accounts of mind, broadly construed. In virtue of the challenge Sartre offers these contemporary functionalist accounts and the richness of his phenomenological analysis, I conclude that his voice needs to be included in ongoing debates over the nature of consciousness. First, I look at some of the basic claims motivating functionalist accounts of mind. Next, I look at Sartre's notion of pre-reflective consciousness and discuss how this notion challenges functionalist accounts of mentality. I conclude by suggesting that Sartre's rendering of pre-reflective consciousness remains overly cognitivist. I show how this notion can be deepened to include the sensory-motor capacities of the situated body—resulting in a pre-reflective bodily self-awareness—and how this deepened formulation offers a further challenge to functionalist accounts of mind.

Sartre's concept of ‘non-thetic awareness’ must be understood as equivalent to the concept of ‘nonconceptual content’ currently discussed in anglophone epistemology and philosophy of mind, since it could not otherwise play the role in the structure of ‘bad faith’, or self-deception, that Sartre ascribes to it. This understanding of the term makes sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Sartre's early philosophy, and has implications for understanding certain areas of his thought.

In this work, Kathleen V. Wider discusses Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of consciousness in Being and Nothingness in light of recent work by analytic philosophers ...