In three interviews, the Marxist historian and scholar Perry Anderson takes Sartre on a wide-ranging tour of his philosophy and politics.

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.

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)

Jean-Paul Sartre's famous autobiography of his first ten years has been widely compared to Rousseau's Confessions. Written when he was fifty-nine years old, The Words is a masterpiece of self-analysis. Sartre the philosopher, novelist and playwright brings to his own childhood the same rigor of honesty and insight he applied so brilliantly to other authors. Born into a gentle, book-loving family and raised by a widowed mother and doting grandparents, he had a childhood which might be described as (...) one long love affair with the printed word. The Words explores and evaluates the whole use of books and language in human experience. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he (...) was about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (“existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make (...) it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes. Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in (...) post-war thought and literature. In _What is Literature?_ Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of literature, exploring why we read, and why we write. (shrink)

_Being and Nothingness_ is without doubt one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The central work by one of the world's most influential thinkers, it altered the course of western philosophy. Its revolutionary approach challenged all previous assumptions about the individual's relationship with the world. Known as 'the Bible of existentialism', its impact on culture and literature was immediate and was felt worldwide, from the absurd drama of Samuel Beckett to the soul-searching cries of the Beat poets. (...) _Being and Nothingness_ is one of those rare books whose influence has affected the mind-set of subsequent generations. Sixty years after its first publication, its message remains as potent as ever - challenging the reader to confront the fundamental dilemmas of human freedom, responsibility and action. (shrink)

A cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy, _The Imaginary_ was first published in 1940. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the 'intentionality of consciousness' as a key to the puzzle of existence. Against this background, _The Imaginary_ crystallized Sartre's worldview and artistic vision. The book is an extended examination of the concepts of nothingness and freedom, both of which are derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects both (...) as they are and as they are not – ideas that would drive Sartre's existentialism and entire theory of human freedom. (shrink)

_Critical Essays _ contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly interesting because it is before Sartre published the magnum opus that would solidify his name as a philosopher, _Being and Nothingness_. Instead, during this time Sartre was emerging as one of France’s most promising young novelists and playwrights—he had already published _Nausea, The Age of Reason, (...) The Flies, _and_ No Exit_. Not content, however, he was meanwhile consciously attempting to revive the form of the essay via detailed examinations of writers who were to become central to European cultural life in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Collected here are Sartre’s experiments in reimagining the idea and structure of the essay. Among the distinguished writers he analyzes are Francis Ponge, Georges Bataille, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Blanchot, and, of course, Albert Camus, whose novel _The Stranger _Sartre endeavours to explain in these pages. _Critical Essays _ also contains a famous attack on the Catholic novelist François Mauriac, studies of the great American literary iconoclasts Faulkner and Dos Passos, and brief but insightful essays on aspects of the philosophical writings of Husserl and Descartes. This new translation by Chris Turner reinvigorates the original skill and voice of Sartre’s work and will be essential reading for fans of Sartre and the many writers and works he explores. “For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time.”—Edward Said. (shrink)

The dynamic development of technology, as well as of AI’s, raises the fundamental question: can machines think? At the beginning of the 20th Century the Austrian philosopher wonders about this problem and analyses it from a logical-philosophical conception which conveys the need to recognize all the elements comprised in the thought-language relationship. An ethical-religious dimension is revealed in certain uses of language. This dimension, which shows the human’s attitude to the world, stems from the human tendency to search for explanations. (...) This attitude does not extend to machines. (shrink)

I argue that Gilles-Gaston Granger (1920–2016) broadly incorporates the central affirmations of Jean Cavaillès’s (1903–44) philosophy of the concept into his own epistemological program. Cavaillès and Granger share three interrelated epistemological commitments: they claim (1) that mathematics has its own content and is therefore autonomous from and irreducible to logic, (2) that conceptual transformations in the history of mathematics can only be explained by an internal dialectic of concepts, and (3) that the objectivity of mathematics is an effect of (...) the productive form of its rationality—that is, they claim that mathematical objectivity is the result of a generative process internal to mathematics. Mathematical objectivity, as I demonstrate, requires Cavaillès and Granger to modify the limits of epistemological critique as envisioned by Kant. For Cavaillès, this modification requires the elimination of the transcendental in favor of a dialectic of concepts. For Granger, the philosophy of the concept remains a genre of transcendental critique, but in a radically revised “Ptolemaic” style. I initially demonstrate how Granger extracts each of these claims from Cavaillès. I then follow Granger as he develops these claims in the service of a novel description of the content and structure of mathematical objectivity. (shrink)

G.E. Moore’s open question arguments (OQAs) have been targeted by unsympathetic philosophers for close to a century. Perhaps the most serious criticism directed towards Moore’s OQAs is that they beg the question against targeted theories. After presenting an OQA extracted from §13 of Principia Ethica, I lodge this question-begging objection before articulating Moore’s autobiographical efforts to mitigate its force. I then suggest that Moore’s OQAs are incomplete, awaiting the final stage of construction, an explanation of the ‘open question’ phenomenon—the inclination (...) of many philosophers to endorse the central premises of Moore’s OQAs. After a brief investigation of noncognitivist attempts to explain the phenomenon, I propose a semantic explanation, a cognitivist explanation that commits its proponents neither to mysterious nonnatural properties nor to perilous positions regarding the paradox of analysis. I conclude by arguing that Moore’s completed OQAs are successful, but his deployment of them in efforts to refute metaethical naturalism, even analytic or semantic versions, is not. (shrink)

I consider metaethics to be a sub-branch of moral philosophy. Some of the most central questions in metaethical inquiry include the following: What are the natures of the meanings of moral terms? If there are such things as moral properties (rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness, etc.), what are their natures?

For Ockham and Wittgenstein the analysis of knowledge is based on language. Both authors uphold the conception of the world from a logical-philosophical dimension configured by the close thought-language relationship. This construct is developed on the basis of the following three aspects: first, concepts are signs of things; second, propositions describe “state of affairs”; and third, knowledge in terms of “habits” is expressed in propositions structured in terms of the “uses” of language. These propositions are established by the thought considered (...) as “activity” and “operation of signs”. By analyzing certain a priori propositions, we recognize the very boundaries of the thought-language relationship, wherein the existential problems of mankind are revealed, whether out of the human tendency of explaining the world as a whole or out of the human attitude in the face of it. (shrink)

A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy. In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness , Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. (...) Presented here for the first time in English, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works. Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States. With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , and The Freud Scenario , both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

The Transcendence of the Ego may be regarded as a turning-point in the philosophical development of Jean-Paul Sartre. Prior to the writing of this essay, published in France in 1937, Sartre had been intimately acquainted with the phenomenological movement which originated in Germany with Edmund Husserl. It is a fundamental tenet of Husserl, the notion of a transcendent ego, which is here attacked by Sartre. This disagreement with Husserl has great importance for Sartre and facilitated the transition from (...) phenomenology to the doctrine of Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

_Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism_ is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic _Wretched_ _of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism _ had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

In Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality, Douglas Portmore introduces a novel position regarding the actualist securitism – a position he argues is theoretically superior to the standard views in both the actualist and possibilist camps. After distinguishing the two camps through an examination of the original Procrastinate case, I present Portmore's securitism and its implications regarding his modified Procrastinate case. I level two serious objections against securitism: that it implausibly implies that morality is radically more demanding for the virtuous (...) than it is for the vicious and that it fails to recognize moral vice in a wide range of cases. I close by arguing that a possibilist variant of Portmore's securitist view is impervious to such objections and thus appears theoretically superior to the actualist version Portmore promotes. (shrink)

Existentialismen är en humanism är en populär startpunkt för att närma sig och diskutera exisentialistiskt tänkande. Här återfinns resonemangen om friheten, valet och ångesten som människans existentiella livsvillkor, vilket sammanfattas i Jean-Paul Sartres välbekanta devis: "existensen föregår essensen".

The lush surreal illustrations of this book and its short humoristic story telling make it a fun, quick read for all ages and for anyone obliquely interested in our thirst for development and the nature of who we are. Through a poetic parody of human's desires for more of everything, we become aware that such a quest does not bring us any closer to knowing ourselves or seeing, as contemporary scientific or spiritual leaders are telling us: all things and beings (...) of our planet are intimately related, alive and ultimately "One." While each colorful painting alludes to our close relationship with the world, short lines innocently and wryly comment on the predicaments of our lives pertaining to the industrial world, where dream and reality often appear intertwined. Through the shifting identities of forms, this album gives us a glance at our own formless nature and how our excessive wish for love, home, comfort, power, and productivity inexorably transforms our worldview and make us bypass our deep infinite nature, which cannot be contained through words. As some indigenous traditions have taught us: "life is like a dream. One wonders whether it is by living that we dream or by dreaming that we live.". (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “The Look”.

La homogeneidad de la Naturaleza, concebida como un todo racional y la universalidad del método se implican en Spinoza. Del principio de la unidad de la sustancia, o sea de la unidad de la Naturaleza tomada como natura naturans y natura naturata, se sigue que no puede existir un método que preceda al conocimiento filosófico. Ahora, si el carácter indisociable de la filosofía y del mos geometricus es efectivo, se debe a la total inteligibilidad para el hombre de la esencia (...) de Dios y de las cosas, ya que de ella se sigue que el conocimiento verdadero, es decir, adecuado, procede del todo a las partes. Con Spinoza, el racionalismo absoluto quiere acabar con el misterio que rodea la razón o que le subyace, misterio que hacía afirmar a Descartes en su tercera meditación que “es propio de la naturaleza de lo infinito que yo,siendo finito, no pueda comprenderlo”. La filosofía de Spinoza se presenta como un intelectualismo íntegro, una doctrina de la necesidad y de la libertad. Mas, podemos preguntarnos: ¿no hay aquí una contradicción entre necesidad y libertad? ¿Será que la filosofía de Spinoza es incoherente? O, dicho en otros términos, ¿es posible para el hombre actuar dentro de un determinismo tan estricto? (shrink)

Deeper still than that of the _differend_, we find in Lyotard the concept of _discrepancy_, which underlines the welcome alterity in the encounter with others. We propose an understanding of Ricœurian anthropology based on this idea, when it is associated with another concept, that of _ergodicity_, which makes it possible to think the same in the discrepancy. We illustrate it with the trial and the act of judging. We then show that the Ricœurian process of putting rival thoughts into dialogue (...) stems from this anthropology, and that Ricœur presents full coherence. For this, another concept is introduced which describes the mechanism of understanding always restarted, in the sense that each new thought must be able to be encompassed in the gaze cast on the world. _Encompassing_ is a concept in modelling disciplines, which is difficult to translate into French. To illustrate this, we take as an example Ricœur’s “debate” with Jakobson in _The Rule of Metaphor_. (shrink)

A new ethics for the global practice of curating Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world. Curating as Ethics is (...) primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial--for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such--sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on. With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today. (shrink)