Introduction: "Know yourself" -- The revelation of God's wisdom -- Credo ut intellegam -- Intellego ut credam -- The relationship between faith and reason -- The interventions of the Magisterium in philosophical matters -- The interaction between philosophy and theology -- Current requirements and tasks -- Conclusion.
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. (shrink)
"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...
Is Jean-Paul Sartre to be credited for Richard Wright's existentialist leanings? This essay argues that while there have been noteworthy philosophical exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Richard Wright, we can find evidence of Wright's philosophical and existential leanings before his interactions with Sartre and Beauvoir. In particular, Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground" is analyzed as an existential, or Black existential, project that is published before Wright met Sartre and/or read his scholarship. Existentialist (...) themes that emerge from Wright's short story include flight, guilt, life, death, dread, and freedom. Additionally, it is argued that "The Man Who Lived Underground" offers a reversal of the prototypical allegory of the cave that we find in the Western (ancient Greek) philosophical tradition. The essay takes seriously the significance of the intellectual exchanges between Sartre, Beauvoir, and Wright while also highlighting Wright's own philosophical legacy. (shrink)
For Jean-Paul Sartre, both love and sexual desire are necessarily doomed to failure. In this paper, I wish to briefly explain why Sartre takes this position. Both love and sexual desire fail, as do all patterns to conduct towards the other, because they involve an attempt to simultaneouslycapture the other-as-subject and as-object. This, for Sartre, involves an ontological contradiction which I demonstrate.Furthermore, I wish to offer the outline of a criticism of this position, a criticism made from the perspective (...) of an acceptance of the basic Sartrian approach taken in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s description of love implies an attempt to overcome ontological aspects of the human condition which are fundamentally insurmountable. I will show that this description is flawed even within the confines of a Sartrian ontology by pointing out unwarranted assumptions on Sartre’s part as to the goals of these activities and their worth, as well as the worth of the emotional consciousness itself. (shrink)
Ce que nous voulons faire dans ce travail, est de presenter des concepts differents de terme de l'existence chez Martin Heidegger et Jean-Paul Sartre. Parce que cette analyse nous donnera la possibility de bien comprendre les principales idees de ces penseurs dans la Philosophie contemporaine.D'abord, nous devons remarquer que le terme d'existence retient une place centrale chez eux. Comme nous l'avons expose dans notre travail, la filiation entre ces penseurs est construite particulierement sur cette idee. Dans ce travail, nous (...) avons pose differentes questions, et nous livrons leurs reponses. D'ailleurs, on voit que chez Heidegger, l'essence du dasein reside dans son existence, et chez Sartre l'existence precede l'essence. En plus, quand Sartre parle d'existence, c'est de maniere abstraite, autrement dit l'existence est un concept analytique. L'existence sartrienne etant la facticite, elle exprime la condition humaine d'un etre pour lequel dans son etre il y va de son etre. D'un autre cote, l'existence pour Heidegger n'est pas un cadre abstrait, un autre mot pour dire la condition humaine mais un lieu etrange et inquietant.Brievement, l'une des plus grandes caracteristiques de l'existence chez Heidegger est qu'elle n'est pas connaissable objectivement, et n'est pas definissable tout court. Mais chez Sartre, l'existence, c'est avant tout d'etre dans ses actes et par ses actes. (shrink)
Within Jean Paul Sartre’s atheistic program, he objected to Christian mysticism as a delusory desire for substantive being. I suggest that a Christian mystic might reply to Sartre’s attack by claiming that Sartre indeed grasps something right about the human condition but falls short of fully understanding what he grasps. Then I argue that the true basis of Sartre’s atheism is neither philosophical nor existentialist, but rather mystical. Sartre had an early mystical atheistic intuition that later developed into atheistic mystical (...) experience. Sartre experienced the nonexistence of God. (shrink)
There is no more prominent atheist today than Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet serious students of Sartre’s philosophy are struck by his unabashed use of theological idiom. This use is so extensive that Professor Hazel Barnes in her translator’s introduction to Being and Nothingness comments: Many people who consider themselves religious could quite comfortably accept Sartre’s philosophy if he did not embarrass them by making his pronouncement, “ There is no God,” quite so specific.1 The present chapter will explore the theological (...) idiom of Sartre’s philosophy of man and pose the question whether—once the “embarrassing atheistic pronouncement” is removed—Sartre’s philosophical anthropology has any systematic value for the theologian. The chapter proceeds along six lines: (1) to investigate Sartre’s conception of human nature; (2-4) to illustrate his employment of theological language in describing man as desiring to be God, guilty of original sin, and incarnate in love; (5) to appraise his arguments for atheism; and (6) to assess particular aspects of his description of human reality. (shrink)
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.
On the subject of football, Serge Mésonès, former French international turned journalist, wrote that ?the true miracle remains the birth of a great team; everything which could contribute to this deserves consideration. Whatever happens, the coach and his group will always form that tandem which Bella Guttman used to compare to a symphony orchestra and their conductor: there is a significant difference between the performance when Toscanini is conducting, and that when the conductor is mediocre? (Mésonès 1992, 12). With the (...) aim of better understanding the issues of such an assertion, in this article we will develop the theoretical elements that we began to tackle in the book Teaching Collective Sport in Schools (1999).1 This will involve clarifying, and going into detail on, some conceptions relating to the long journey that is the formation of a sporting group, exploring one scenario at a time. (shrink)
Emotion is traditionally described as a phenomenon that dominates the subject because one does not choose to be angry, sad, or happy. However, would it be totally absurd to conceive emotion as behaviour and a manifestation of the spontaneity and liberty of consciousness? In his short text, Esquisse d''une theorie des émotions, Sartre proposes a phenomenological description of this psychological phenomenon. He distinguishes between constituted affectivity, which gives rise to emotions, and an original affectivity lacking intentionality, and tied closely to (...) bodily processes. It appears that emotion is first and foremost a magical attitude toward the world, an attitude freely adopted by the subject. Against what is often written, this thesis doesn''t mean that emotion would be a pure comedy but only that, in spite of appearances, this behaviour isn''t a matter of what Descartes calls soul''s passions. (shrink)
Understanding ourselves -- The reality of character -- Situations -- Freely chosen projects -- Radical freedom -- Anguish, bad faith, and sincerity -- The project of bad faith -- God and the useless passion -- One another -- The virtue of authenticity -- Being one self.
This study of Sartre's first novel seeks to move beyond the metaphysical constraints that are implicit when specifically focusing on either the work's literary or philosophical qualities, instead approaching the text as metafiction. Through an understanding of the novel's self-referentiality, its awareness of its accordance to narrative technique or reliance on existential verbatim, one gains an understanding of Sartre's fascination with the dialogue that exists between literature and philosophy. The examination of La Nausée and its Anglo-American criticism leads to a (...) re-evaluation of the role of bad faith, in which character, author and, particularly, reader, are implicit. For reading is, like Roquentin's concluding understanding of existence, a balancing-act between the in-itself and the for-itself ; an interaction with bad faith in which it is the individual/the reader that is responsible for attributing meaning to experience/ La Nausée. (shrink)
Andrew Dobson charts Sartre's transformation from novelist and apolitical philosopher of existentialism, before the Second World War, to a committed defender of Marxism and Marxist method after it. Examining Sartre's post-war work in detail, he shows how the biographies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, often considered tangential to his main oeuvres, are in fact central to this defence of Marxism, and should therefore be read as acts of political commitment. Andrew Dobson's study is new in its use of posthumous sources, (...) including one of the first extended commentaries in English of Volume II of the Critique of dialectical reason, and in its insistence on reading Sartre's philosophical development as primarily politically motivated. It provides a clear reading of some of Sartre's less familiar works, situating them in an overarching social and political project. (shrink)
: This essay focuses on some important concepts in Beauvoir's philosophy: ambiguity, desire, and appeal (appel). Ambiguity and appeal, concepts originating in Beauvoir's moral philosophy, are in The Second Sex connected to the female body and feminine desire. This indicates the complexity of Beauvoir's image of femininity. This essay also proposes a comparative reading of Beauvoir's and Sartre's concepts of appeal, a reading that indicates differences in their views of the relationship among ethics, desire, and gender.
This essay focuses on some important concepts in Beauvoir's philosophy: ambiguity, desire, and appeal (appel). Ambiguity and appeal, concepts originating in Beauvoir's moral philosophy, are in The Second Sex connected to the female body and feminine desire. This indicates the complexity of Beauvoir's image of femininity. This essay also proposes a comparative reading of Beauvoir's and Sartre's concepts of appeal, a reading that indicates differences in their views of the relationship among ethics, desire, and gender.
Struggle with self identity is a life-Iong moral undertaking, an essential dimension of which is connecting one’s past and future in a way that preserves integrity and wholeness. The argument of this paper is that one reading of Sartre’s understanding of bad faith and authenticity can illuminate this project. More specifically, the essay provides an interpretation of Sartre’s claim that “I am not what I am and I am what Iam not” that avoids understanding the self as an ontological nothingness (...) poised between past and future. Rather, Sartre’s phrase is interpreted as recognizing that we experience ourselves as a rich, complex continuum that connects past and future. This understanding of the self acknowledges the tension between past and future, but sees that tension as the matrix out of which a responsible self emerges. (shrink)
This article is about the chief character of Sartre?s unfinished trilogy of novels known as Les chemins de la liberté—Daniel, Mathieu?s fellow-student at the École normale, Daniel the "archangel," Daniel the shamefaced pederast, Daniel the gaping wound, Daniel the strange hero, Daniel the recurrent figure in many of Sartre?s works. We do not intend to offer yet another explanation of this handsome young literature professor?s convoluted character to the explanations that already exist, nor to interpret yet again his detestation of (...) mankind and his prayers to God, which the author openly mocks. What we wish to do in these few pages is firstly to shed light on the procedures of Daniel?s imagination and evolution, and secondly to analyze how the author?s goals changed as, while writing the trilogy, he evolved from Gallimard?s up and coming star into the symbol of the search for freedom, the spokesman whom some disagreed with, criticised, despised, while others glorified him and praised him to the skies. We would like to try and elucidate the evolution of this character, steering between the free future of a literary work in progress and the ungraspable heart of darkness. (shrink)
J.-P. Morel, « Le Docteur Toulouse ou le Cinéma vu par un psycho-physiologiste (1912-1928) », 1895. Revue de l'association française de recherche sur l'histoire du cinéma, n° 60, 2010, p. 122-155. Cet ensemble de textes, réédités pour la première fois pour la plupart, met en lumière l'intérêt que le cinéma a suscité chez les scientifiques qui cherchaient à évaluer les changements que la perception de l'image intermittente pouvait occasionner sur la physiologie et la psychologie des spectateurs en y (...) - (...) Brèves. (shrink)
