The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir

by Wendy O'Brien (Editor), Lester Embree (Editor)

Overview

While earlier research considered Simone de Beauvoir in the perspectives of Existentialism or Feminism, this work is the first to emphasize her reflective and descriptive approach and the full range of issues she addresses. There are valuable chapters and sections that are historical and/or comparative, but most of the contents of this work critically examine Beauvoir's views on old age (whereon she is the first phenomenologist to work), biology, gender, ethics, ethnicity (where she is among the first), and politics (again among the first). Besides their systematic as well as historical significance, these chapters show her philosophy as on a par with those of Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre in quality, richness and distinctiveness of problematics, and the penetration of her insight into collective as well as individual human life within the socio-historical world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789048157327
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	12/07/2010
Series:	Contributions to Phenomenology , #43
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2001
Pages:	263
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

1 The Beginnings of Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology.- 2 Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of History in Le Deuxième Sexe.- 3 Beauvoir and Plato: The Clinic and the Cave.- 4 A Saraband of Imagery: The Uses of Biological Science in Le Deuxième Sexe.- 5 The Body as a Basis for Being: Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.- 6 For the Time Being: Simone de Beauvoir’s Representation of Temporality.- 7 The Lived Experience of Doubling: Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Old Age.- 8 Phenomenology and the Ethical Bases of Pluralism: Arendt and Beauvoir on Race in the United States.- 9 Beauvoir as Situated Subject: The Ambiguities of Life in World War II France.- 10 Between the Ethical and the Political: The Difference of Ambiguity.- Simone de Beauvoir and Existential Phenomenology: A Bibliography.- Notes on Contributors.