Online research in philosophy

On the back cover of the original French edition of Sartre's Le scénario Freud (The Freud Scenario), the promotional blurb poses the question: "Est-ce ici Sartre qui analyse Freud ou Freud qui analyse Sartre?" (Is Sartre analyzing Freud here, or is Freud analyzing Sartre?). We do not, for obvious reasons, have anything of Freud's on Sartre, but we do have quite a lot of Sartre on Freud, and great quantities of Sartre on Sartre. It has sometimes seemed to me that reading through everything that Sartre wrote—not just the autobiographical material but everything, including the carnets and the cahiers and the letters—might be a bit like having him in analysis. The speed and apparent openness with which he produced his texts, page after page in that quick yet legible script that French writers seem to turn out so effortlessly, mimic some of the conditions of free association, and an analytically sensitive eye, like the analyst's ear in therapeutic sessions, could no doubt piece together a plausible account of the Sartrean unconscious.

Sartre's French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences This final volume examines Sartre's best-known philosophical contemporaries in France-Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir-in terms of both their own philosophical insights and their relationship to Sartre's thought. The articles also offer some suggestive connections between Sartre's thought and subsequent developments in European philosophy, notably structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. The comparatively recent nature of much of this scholarship is solid testimony to the enduring influence of Sartrean existentialism.

Apostles of Sartre is a broad look at the impact on American philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism -- from its introduction to this country in 1945 ...

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.

The impetus for exploring the relationship between Sartre and Foucault may be informed more by Foucault than by Sartre, as it would seem to be geared toward a Foucauldian determination of the discursive parameters of a particular dimension of modern philosophy; that is, of the history of philosophy, including, by extension, the history of existentialism. But insofar as this determination opens up a significant dimension of the situation of philosophy today - of our situation and of the situation of existentialism - it is also Sartrean in nature, as are the effects of this determination, a determination situated somewhere between Sartre's philosophy of freedom and the freedom afforded to Foucault and to us all by the practice of philosophy, and by its future possibilities, which include the possibility "… that I do not believe a word, not one little word, of all I've just scribbled.".

Various ethical theories recommend developing a morally sound character, and therefore require an understanding of the nature and development of traits. Philosophers usually accept the Aristotelian view that traits are a combination of habit and insight. Sartre’s early work offers an alternative: traits consist in projects. One aim of this paper is to show that this is indeed Sartre’s view, by explaining the errors that have lead philosophers to ignore his theory of character or deny that he has one. The other is to clarify the theory, by investigating his notion of project and its relation to other prominent aspects of his philosophy, by distinguishing a broadly Sartrean theory of character from Sartre’s own brand of this theory, and by comparing this broadly Sartrean theory with the Aristotelian theory. The paper focuses on Being and Nothingness and The Transcendence of the Ego, but also discusses some of Sartre’s other works.

For the one hundredth anniversary of Sartre's birth it is fitting to consider some of the ways in which his thought remains relevant to our present concerns and to those of the foreseeable future. In this age of terrorism, most people would perhaps think first of Sartre's writings on political violence. Analytical philosophers, on the other hand, might be more inclined to cite Sartre's early works on such "hot" topics as the emotions and the imagination, not to mention consciousness more generally. And historians of philosophy, mindful of the cyclical nature of philosophical fashions and enthusiasms, might well point to a developing resurgence of interest in phenomenology, and to Sartre's distinctive contributions to that philosophical movement. Indeed, given the astonishing range of Sartre's writings, on everything from art to biography to history to psychology to literary criticism, it is impossible in one short essay to identify every contribution of enduring (or perhaps even permanent) value. Accordingly, I will focus here on just two topics: freedom and education.

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).

It is well known that Sartre describes his form of existentialism as atheistic, and much of the rhetoric of Sartrean existentialism draws off the image of God's absence from the world. There are nevertheless, I argue, deep grounds for thinking that the coherence and well-groundedness of Sartre's thought requires that his phenomenological ontology take finally the form of an onto-theology: Sartre's ontology runs into difficulties concerning the origin of the for-itself and the unity of being; an onto-theology like Schelling's, which avoids the ‘ontological optimism’ that Sartre objects to in Hegel, both releases Sartre's ontology from its difficulties and furthers Sartre's central philosophical purposes. (Published Online July 10 2006).