This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies. We accepted about 50 (...) presentations from around the world. Professor Lisa Bortolotti and I gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted seven papers and an essay for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the subjective/objective debate, narrative meaning, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alain Badiou, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of meaning in life. (shrink)

This article will offer an alternative understanding of managerial decision-making drawing from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason rather than simply Being and Nothingness. I will begin with a brief explanation of Sartre’s account of freedom in Being and Nothingness. I will then show in the second section how Andrew West uses Sartre’s conception of radical freedom from Being and Nothingness for a managerial decision-making model. In the third section, I will explore a more robust account of freedom from Sartre’s Critique (...) of Dialectical Reason. I will attempt to show that freedom is not simply a matter of choosing (or not choosing) to perform an action, but entails external constraints—including other people. Finally, I will provide the implications of this account of freedom for managerial decision-making. I will show that it’s unreasonable to place full responsibility and/or blame on managers given their constraints. This does not absolve them from responsibility, but better accounts for the way in which we ought to hold them responsible. (shrink)

: Contemporary common sense holds that authenticity is an ethical ideal: that there is something bad about inauthenticity, and something good about authenticity. Here we criticize the view that authenticity is bad because it detracts from the wellbeing of the inauthentic person, and propose an alternative moral account of the badness of inauthenticity, based on the idea that inauthentic behaviour is potentially misleading.

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

This paper suggests that design ethics can be enriched by considering ethics beyond the traditional approaches of deontology, teleology, and virtue ethics. Design practice and design ethics literature tend to frame ethics in design according to these approaches. The paper argues that a fundamental and concrete ethical understanding of design ethics can also be found in Sartrean Existentialism, a philosophy centered on the individual and his/her absolute freedom. Through the analysis of four core concepts of Sartrean Existentialism that define a (...) specific ethics, the paper illustrates why such philosophical approach is relevant to design ethics. The paper also shows how Sartrean Existentialism and its ethics apply to critical issues of professional practice in design such as professional engagement and design decision-making. The paper finally argues that Sartre’s philosophy and ethics is a perspective that offers the designer in design practice a solid ground to engage his/her ethical dilemma. (shrink)

It is a widely held view among scholars and commentators on the works of Jean-Paul Sartre that his corpus can be roughly divided into an early, largely a-political, non-Marxist period, and a later, more overtly political, post-liberation period. InThe Early Sartre and Marxism, Sam Coombes seeks to problematise this interpretation of Sartre’s corpus by undertaking a re-evaluation of a wide array of pre-liberation and early post-liberation writings in order to establish the extent to which views fully consistent with a certain (...) brand of Marxism are already present therein. The later period, he argues, does not so much constitute a break from the early work as a more complete development of certain nascent themes and concerns. There are difficulties inherent in any claim that Sartre’s early work is consonant with Marxism, primarily due to the fundamental incompatibilities between Sartre’s ontological description of liberation as a project of individual freedom and the inherent hostility of interpersonal relations, and Marxism’s requirements of the development of class consciousness and social solidarity for revolutionary action. Nonetheless, the modest claim that through the 1930s and early ’40s themes and ideas are appearing in Sartre’s work that are indeed not abandoned but constitute the basis of Sartre’s later more directly Marxist writings is compelling and may serve to reopen fruitful speculative philosophical dialogue between Sartre’s early existentialism and Marxism. (shrink)

Paradigmatically led by existential phenomenological premises, as formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl specifically, this paper aims at a deconstruction of the value of psychiatric labelling in terms of the implications of such labelling for the labelled individual’s experience of freedom as a conscious imperative. This work has as its intention the destabilisation of labelling as a stubborn and inexorable mechanism for social propriety and regularity, which in its unyielding classificatory brandings is Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 2, (...) Edition 1, April 2002. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to remedy the relative neglect that has befallen Sartre’s analysis of social relations in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I show that, contrary to the interpretation of certain commentators, Sartre’s analysis of social relations in this text does not contradict his earlier works. While his early work focuses on individual-to-individual social relations, the Critique of Dialectical Reason complements this by focusing on the way various group formations constrain or enhance the individual’s practical freedom. To outline (...) my argument, I first discuss the relationship between Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason before going on to identify the four group formations Sartre discusses in the Critique of Dialectical Reason and the implications each has for the individual’s practical freedom. I argue that while the group formations called the series and the institution constrain the individual’s practical freedom, the open, democratic group formations called the group-in-fusion and, in particular, the organized group, enhance the individual’s practical freedom. Because it is membership of an organized group that best enhances the individual’s practical freedom, I conclude by arguing that Sartre implicitly holds that the individual’s practical and political activity should be directed towards the establishment of a group formation that has the characteristics of an organized group. (shrink)

This article analyses Sartre's conflicting interpretations of human relationality in Critique of Dialectical Reason and Hope Now in order to demostrate two things. First, that the social dynamics leading to the formation of what Sartre calls “fused groups” and “fraternity-terror” are still at play in current manifestations of exclusionary and antagonistic conceptions of identity politics, which we contend constitute a risk for contemporary democracy. Second, that an alternative conception of “fraternity-without-terror”, whose foundations can be found in Sartre's latest reflections upon (...) the possibility of a normative ethics of reciprocity, can pave the ground to a fairer model of political solidarity. (shrink)

This essay is divided into three parts. In the first, I develop a new interpretation of Sartre's notion of an original project, or original choice, by emending his initial position in Being and Nothingness, and by extrapolating from his autobiography and his psychobiographies on Baudelaire and Flaubert. In the second part, I examine the early and late Sartre's paradoxical commitment to self-analysis, and go on to draw taut the tension in the late Sartre between individual freedom and relations to others. (...) I demonstrate that the tension in the thought of the late Sartre can be explained and resolved only with reference to Sartre's own original projects. The third part is devoted to briefly analyzing what combination of factors in Sartre's developmental history led to his original projects, in view of a possible psychobiography on Sartre. Nearly everything covered in this essay is an attempt by Sartre to appropriate Freud as an instrument in his own thought. In the third part, I also try to show that Freud resists Sartre's analysis, as it were, and that Sartre only proves Freud right. (shrink)

Purpose. The article is aimed to show the specificity and heuristic value of the humanism of the French existentialist J.-P. Sartre, represented both in his early works, where the isolationist position prevailed, and considering his evolution to various types of collective responsibility and attempts to build a universal morality on the basis of ontological integral humanity. Theoretical basis. Taking into account the relevance of the topic of person’s searching for authentic existence in the modern world, the author analyzes the concept (...) of Sartre’s humanism, which remains poorly researched in the Ukrainian philosophical space, since most of his works of the later period remained untranslated and unknown to the Ukrainian community. That is, there is a need to consider the phenomenon of a human and his/her basic characteristics, which ultimately determine what type of humanism deserves further support and development. The author places the existentialist dimension of a human being, which is one of the most important determinants of human behavior and the ways of human self-determination of his/her existence, in the context of the general development of the humanistic tradition of modern anthropology. Originality. The article substantiates the thesis that Sartre’s position concerning humanism is conditioned by the specificity of his understanding of the authentic human existence as a constant self-transcendence, the person’s realization of the project that makes a person the creator of the values. Therefore, Sartre’s humanism can only be understood in the context of this self-construction and responsibility of a person for his/her choice. The author proved that although this concept was subsequently changed, the basic intention of the Sartre’s approach remains the same. Thus, having combined the existentialism and Marxist understanding of the historical process, Sartre nevertheless emphasizes that the primal intentionality of human existence is decisive in all subsequent actions and doings, despite the fact that real practice may demonstrate deviations and even regression concerning humanity. Having defined the universality of the human situation in the world as the presence of certain a priori restrictions, the philosopher comes to the recognition of intersubjectivity, which allows him to reach a new type of morality, which defines "integral humanity" or "full-fledged human" as its goal. Conclusions. The interpretation of humanism by early Sartre relied on the idea of a person as such, who is in constant transcendence, constantly constructing him/herself; he/she is oriented towards the future. In this case, a person is the creator of the values and their legislator in this world. At the same time, the late Sartre emphasized that since a person exists in a society where he/she is usually in a state of alienation, the question under which conditions and by what means is it possible to reproduce and realize a truly humanistic dimension is inevitable. Sartre’s position is based on the fact that there is a primal need for self-realization, to be human. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard and Jean-Paul Sartre both locate the source of ethical normativity in human reflective consciousness. Korsgaard’s claims that human beings are essentially rational, and that our rational nature is an adequate source of ethical content. Sartre argues that a conception of human nature this minimal is insufficient to provide ethical content, and that we must look to our particular projects and identities to provide moral content. I will argue that Sartre is correct that a view of human nature (...) this minimal is inadequate to generate moral content, but that because Sartre is unable to demonstrate how norms based contingent projects and identities can produce universally binding ethical norms, his theory also fails. The failure of both projects illustrates the weakness of a conception of ethics as universal obligation because it fails by its own standard to produce it goal of universally binding ethical norms with content. (shrink)

The question of nothingness occupies the thinking of a number of philosophers in the first half of the twentieth-century, with three of the most important responses being those of Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Surprisingly, however, there has been little discussion of their specific comments on nothingness either individually or comparatively. This paper starts to remedy this by suggesting that, while Bergson dismisses nothingness as a pseudo-problem based in a flawed metaphysical understanding, Heidegger, in What is Metaphysics?, claims (...) that metaphysics entails a covering of being meaning that Bergson’s analysis actually depends on and so brings thinking to a questioning of being. In turn, Heidegger’s insight acts as the transitional point for Sartre who criticizes Bergson’s description of nothingness to show that, following Heidegger, nothingness is a real ontological problem. From this insight, Sartre distinguishes between negativity, nothingness, and nihilation to show that the issue of nothingness is intimately connected to the freedom of human consciousness, which, by distinguishing between ontological and practical freedom, reveals that nothingness has ethical and political significance. By way of conclusion, a number of problems in Sartre’s account are identified. (shrink)