In July 1940, Simone de Beauvoir began a routine of going to the Bibliothèque Nationale most days from 2.00 to 5.00 p.m. to read G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Hitler's armies had invaded and occupied Paris earlier, on June 14, 1940. She was teaching philosophy classes at a girls' lycée and living in her grandmother's empty apartment. Her close companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a soldier in a meteorological unit of the French Army, had been captured and (...) was now being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Beauvoir was relieved to receive a note from him sent on July 2 saying he was being well treated, but life in Paris was dismal. Food was scarce, and the German troops were grim reminders of Parisians' lack of political freedom. Her reading routine helped soothe the dread, isolation, and alienation she felt. Beauvoir had always been a very earnest student. She had passed the demanding aggregation exam in philosophy at the young age of twenty-one. To supplement her knowledge of classical philosophical texts, she learned German and read texts in phenomenology. In 1935 she had read Edmund Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness “without too much difficulty.” She also read Heidegger and translated long passages into French for Sartre. Back when she was in college, her prodigious work habits had earned her a special nickname among her friends: Castor, or the beaver. Poring over a difficult philosophical text in a foreign language for three hours a day might seem a strange way to get through such times, but with her it made sense. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Hypatia 14.4 (1999) 186-191 -/- [Access article in PDF] Simone De Beauvoir: a Critical Reader. Edited by Elizabeth Fallaize. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. As this special volume attests, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in Simone de Beauvoir. A number of books on her have been published in the last several years. However, Elizabeth Fallaize's book, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (1998), occupies (...) a special niche. Many of its essays are excerpts from studies done of Beauvoir's work before this latest renaissance. Some of these studies are not in print in the United States. Some are perhaps unfamiliar to present-day readers or those from different disciplines. In addition, the articles reprinted here are otherwise not easily accessible. Fallaize has performed an important service by gathering them all in one place and by carefully editing, presenting, and, in some cases, translating them. -/- The book is divided into three sections, the first entitled "Readings of The Second Sex." Aside from Judith Okely's piece that assesses Beauvoir's chapter on myths from an anthropological standpoint, the essays mainly address the philosophical aspects of this work. Beauvoir herself of course swore that she was not a philosopher and that Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1953) was the sole philosophical foundation for all her work. Some recent analyses have attempted to turn this picture on its head by arguing that Beauvoir was a central influence on, or even the origin of, the philosophical doctrines put forward in Being and Nothingness. None of the writers in this book addresses this issue. But two emphasize Beauvoir's intellectual independence from Sartre. -/- The Swedish scholar Eva Lundgren-Gothlin argues that Beauvoir turned to G. W. F. Hegel to find a satisfactory theoretical model with which to explain the subjugation of women (Lundgren-Gothlin's essay is taken from her book [End Page 186] Sex and Existence [1996]) . In opposition to other scholars, she argues that the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, not Sartre, influenced Beauvoir's interpretation of Hegel. Following Hegel and Kojève, Beauvoir envisioned a possible resolution to the struggle for recognition—reciprocal recognition—whereas Sartre's view of self-other relations in Being and Nothingness rules such reciprocity out. However, Lundgren-Gothlin judges, Beauvoir was not critical enough of the sexist presuppositions of Hegel's thought, citing the same pronouncements Beauvoir makes that subsequent feminists have criticized. -/- Another piece that stresses Beauvoir's philosophical originality is "Beauvoir: The Weight of Situation," taken from Sonia Kruks's book Situation and Human Existence (1990). For some time, Kruks has been doing excellent work placing Beauvoir within the wider phenomenological tradition. In this piece, she argues that, starting with the early essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and culminating in The Second Sex (1989), Beauvoir elaborated a more nuanced position on the nature and extent of human freedom than Sartre did in Being and Nothingness. According to Beauvoir, human freedom, which Sartre dramatically proclaims is absolute, can under some conditions, notably conditions of severe oppression, "be reduced to no more than a suppressed potentiality" (Fallaize 1998, 57). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir definitively breaks with the philosophical framework of Being and Nothingness by implying that a woman's situation is a general one, not individually self-constituted, and one that she cannot transcend by an act of free choice. The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a better foundation for Beauvoir's conception of subjectivity as socially mediated and embodied than does Sartre's philosophy, Kruks suggests. -/- Another piece in this section, Judith Butler's landmark essay "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex" (1986), highlights Beauvoir's philosophical originality in a different way. In her introduction, Fallaize points out how this essay served as a foundation for Butler's own subsequent work on a performative theory of gender. Butler argues that Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but becomes a woman implies that gender is socially constructed and not natural, as people have insisted for centuries. But to the extent that we become women, gender is not something... (shrink)

People act for reasons. That is how we understand ourselves. But what is it to act for a reason? This is what Fred Schueler investigates. He rejects the dominant view that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do, and argues instead for a view centred on practical deliberation--our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept. Schueler's account of 'reasons explanations' emphasizes the relation between reasons and purposes, and the fact (...) that the reasons for an action are not always good reasons. (shrink)

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

Does action always arise out of desire? G. F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished - roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes - apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken. Desire probes a fundamental issue in philosophy of mind, the nature of desires and how, if at all, they motivate and justify our actions. At (...) least since Hume argued that reason "is and of right ought to be the slave of the passions," many philosophers have held that desires play an essential role both in practical reason and in the explanation of intentional action. G. F. Schueler looks at contemporary accounts of both roles in various belief-desire models of reasons and explanation and argues that the usual belief-desire accounts need to be replaced. Schueler contends that the plausibility of the standard belief-desire accounts rests largely on a failure to distinguish "desires proper," like a craving for sushi, from so-called "pro attitudes," which may take the form of beliefs and other cognitive states as well as desires proper. Schueler's "deliberative model" of practical reasoning suggests a different view of the place of desire in practical reason and the explanation of action. He holds that we can arrive at an intention to act by weighing the relevant considerations and that these may not include desires proper at all. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the latter group [of Non-Humeans] is correct. My argument focuses on practical deliberation and has two parts. I will discuss two different problems that arise for the Humean Theory and suggest that while taken individually each problem appears to have a solution, for each problem the solution Humeans offer precludes solving the other problem. I will suggest that to see these difficulties we must take seriously the thought that we can only understand an (...) agent’s reasons for her action by looking at her actual or possible practical deliberation. (shrink)