Sartre and Existentialism: Philosophy, Politics, Ethics, the Psyche, Literature, and Aesthetics – serie

The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-CenturyExistentialismThis volume recaptures, through the writings of figures already well-known in the mid-1940s, the coming-to-consciousness of the existentialist movement, along with early disagreements concerning its significance. The articles present various critics' shifting views of that significance and the movement's standing over subsequent decades. Despite the centrality of Sartre's thought to existentialism, these selections offer interestingly diverse perceptions of his place within the existentialist pantheon, along with varied interpretations of both the historical origins and the future importance of existential philosophy.

Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky,Nietzsche, Jaspers, HeideggerThese essays explore the relationship to existentialism of some of Sartre's 19th-century predecessors and near-contemporaries. For example, Kierkegaard was never told that he was an existentialist, and Heidegger rejected the label. Nevertheless, they, along with the others discussed in this volume, are frequently identified as such. Some of the contributors clarify these issues through their disagreements with one another, while others analyze major affinities and differences between Sartre and other existentialists on such basic subjects as freedom, transcendence, and the connection between human beings and Being.

William L. McBride Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, is co-founder of the North American Sartre Society, and the first chairperson of its executive board. His most recent publications include Social and Political Philosophy and Sartre's Political Theory. He was recently named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the French Government, and has served as Chairperson of the Committee on International Cooperation of the American Philosophical Association and as President of the Societe Americaine de Philosophie de Langue Francaise.

Existentialist Ontology and Human ConsciousnessThe majority of the distinguished scholarly articles in this volume focus on Sartre's early philosophical work, which dealt first with imagination and the emotions, then with the critique of Husserl's notion of a transcendental ego, and finally with systematic ontology presented in his best-known book, Being and Nothingness. In addition, since his preoccupation with ontological questions and especially with the meanings of ego, self, and consciousness endured throughout his career, other essays discuss these themes in light of later developments both in Sartre's own thought and in the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and analytic traditions.

Existentialist EthicsEthics was Sartre's principal concern, beginning with his famous and complex treatment of bad faith in Being and Nothingness, and continuing through his massive posthumously-published Notebooks for an Ethics of the late 1940's, and his mostly unpublished lecture notes that date back to 1964. This volume contains highly informed analyses of all of these materials and other Sartrean works on ethics, as well as interpretations emphasizing the confrontation of his ethical ideas with inauthenticity, sexism, and racism.

Existentialist Politics and Political TheoryThe publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960 marked the culmination of Sartre's efforts, begun in his more occasional political writings in what became essentially his journal, Les Temps Modernes, and developed more systematically in his important essay, Search for a Method, to forge links between existentialism and a non-orthodox version of Marxism with a view to developing a new philosophy of politics, society, and history and a new approach to the philosophy of the social sciences. The articles provide a wide-ranging, insightful exploration of Sartre's successes and failures in this domain.

Existentialist Literature and AestheticsMost of Sartre's extensive works of and about literature-his fiction, his drama, his never-produced film script on Freud, and his extensive biographical studies of Genet and Flaubert-as well as theoretical questions about these genres and their relationship to philosophy, are here subjected to critical scrutiny by leading experts from both literature and philosophy. The essays illuminate Sartrean existentialism's contribution to bridging the gap between the two disciplines as well as that between existentialism and other recent approaches to literary criticism.