Jean-Paul Sartre
Story Stream
Reciprocal Otherness September 27, 2023
One evening in 1932, Simone de Beauvoir joined Jean-Paul Sartre and his old schoolfriend, the philosopher Raymond Aron, for a drink at a bar in Montparnasse.1 The three of them enthusiastically ordered apricot cocktails, the specialty of the house. A...
Fred Chappell Appreciates Rabelais September 26, 2023
The stories of the giant Gargantua and his giant son Pantagruel, of their birth, nurture, education, and heroic feats of arms; of Pantagruel’s voyages through strange lands and exotic cultures in search of ultimate wisdom; of their companions Rondibi...
How Emily Wilson Reimagined Homer September 21, 2023
Every day, the news reminds us of our collective failure as knowers. From history and literature, we have learned over and over that war has a boomerang effect that destroys everything. Yet here we are again: in Ukraine, in Tigray, in Syria. As the s...
Dreyfus, Zionism, and Sartre October 11, 2021
Ispent most of the summer in Paris, where sidewalk tables were packed with refugees from lockdown, most of them gabbing, drinking, and vaping. (“Belle Vape,” one store’s sign read.) If you were alone, the unspoken rule seemed to be that one must smok...
The Outsider June 11, 2021
On October 20, 2011, the four-decade rule of Muammar Gaddafi came to a brutal end when Libyan rebels, supported by NATO bombers and Predator drones, captured, tortured, and killed the fugitive leader. A few days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clin...
A Monumental New Study of Cold War Culture May 07, 2021
Louis menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over. It seems like the right gift for the graduating college senior this year. Born in 2000, the pro...
The Four Thinkers Who Reinvented Philosophy December 21, 2020
In 1936, writing from exile in Paris, the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin looked back at the storms of the recent past with clear-eyed despair. Everything had happened so quickly that it was difficult to register what, in fact, had happened. A n...
Top 10 Books about Great Thinkers November 23, 2020
What is the relationship between the thinker and the thought? This is a question that all writers of intellectual biographies grapple with. One must relate the life to the thought without conflating them, without ascribing to every effect a cause, an...
A Ride Through Applied Philosophy September 01, 2020
I was 12- or 13-years-old when an uncle gave me a copy of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World. It was long and full of ideas that were new to me, so I spent the summer with my head in and out of that book.It opened the door to philosophy, and I crossed ...
2020's Existentialist Turn August 28, 2020
Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Albert Camus’s frequently invoked novel The Plague, Friedrich Nietzsche’s turn to tragedy, and Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of bad faith, ...
Sooner or Later We All Face Death May 15, 2020
espite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memor...
The Outrageous Optimism of Jean-Paul Sartre April 17, 2020
April 15 is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. I can still remember hearing the news. It was not unexpected — he had been seriously ill for some time — but it still came as a shock. For those of my generation who had made our ...
Was Simone de Beauvoir as Feminist as We Thought? August 27, 2019
Simone de Beauvoir is a feminist icon. She didn’t just write the feminist book, she wrote the movement’s bible, The Second Sex. She was an engaged intellectual who combined philosophical and literary productivity with real-world political action that...
Lives of Existential Philosophers December 11, 2016
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Shakespeare's Hamlet, a troubled dropout struggling with questions of responsibility, to his best friend. Even by the Elizabethan era, it seems, a disci...
