Sartre: A Philosophical Biography
Cambridge University Press, 12/29/2014
EAN 9780521826402, ISBN10: 0521826403
Hardcover, 448 pages, 23.1 x 15.7 x 4.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Regarded as the father of existentialist philosophy, he was also a political critic, moralist, playwright, novelist, and author of biographies and short stories. Thomas R. Flynn provides the first book-length account of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, mapping the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, and building a narrative that is not only philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary dimensions of his work. Exploring Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology, this book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and politics with an 'egoless' consciousness. It will appeal to all who are interested in Sartre's philosophy and its relation to his life.
1. The childhood of a genius
2. An elite education
student, author, soldier, teacher
3. Teaching in the Lycée, 1931–1939
4. First triumph
The Imagination
5. Consciousness as imagination
6. The necessity of contingency
Nausea
7. The war years, 1939–1944
8. Bad faith in human life
Being and Nothingness
9. Existentialism
the fruit of liberation
10. Ends and means
existential ethics
11. Means and ends
political existentialism
12. A theory of history
Search for a Method
13. Individuals and groups
Critique of Dialectical Reason
14. A second ethics?
15. Existential biography
Flaubert and others
Conclusion
the Sartrean imaginary, chastened but indomitable.