What is radical freedom? What is

woman? What is Being?

ExistentialismJean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,

Heidegger, Husserl

Jean Paul Sartre 1905-1980

French existentialist, philosopher, playright, novelist, social activist

“Nausea,” “No Exit,” Being and Nothingness

Atheist

“Existence precedes essence.”

Atheism:God doesn’t exist--abandoned!

No divine conception of human nature; no specific essence

You are what YOU make of yourself!

No Ultimate Reason why anything

happens.Individuals are thrown into existence

Not like inanimate objects “being-in-themselves” mere existence

Humans “being-for-itself” self-aware conscious subject

Condemned to be Free

Because there is no God and hence no divine plan...

Human beings are free-- “we are alone, without excuses.”

Big responsibility --existential overtones.

“Bad Faith”

Responsibility absolutely inescapable-Anguish!

Many people do not feel this anguish

They are hiding, fleeing from big “R”--self deception

“Authenticity”

Understandable why we avoid shouldering responsibility

Absurdity results in revulsion & boredom

Accept responsibility: Live in Authenticity

Fundamental project

Simone de Beauvoir1908-1986

French author and philosopher

Feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution

Woman as “other”--Social construct to women’s oppression

“One is not born but becomes a woman.”

“The Second Sex

-she criticized the patriarchial assumptions:

women’s “natural” inferiority justifies patriarchial domination

Sartre and de Beauvoir

met at the Sorbonne

relationship of sixty years

refused bonds of marriage and fidelity

freedom triumphed over convention

Phenomenology

interests itself in the essential structures

found within stream of conscious experiences

independent of assumptions and presumptions

Edmund Husserl

investigate phenomena while “bracketing” assumptions

phenomenological reduction

investigate phen-omena without making assumptions

Martin Heidegger1889-1976

What is being?

We can get lost in superficiality of life

Everydayness and idle chatter

Sorge - care - what is most prominent feature of humans

Later Heidegger

Shh! Quiet. We must listen to the sound of Being.

What is Being? the most fundamental question.

Silence. Poetry.

Hannah Arendt1905-1975

Student of Heidegger

Banality of Evil

The Life of the Mind

Teacher of Bennet