In an attempt to start rectifying a lamentable disparity in scholarship, we evince fruitful points of similarity and difference in the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, paying particular attention to their views on long-term projects. Endorsing what might be called an “Ethic of Resolve,” Rand praises those who undertake sustained goal-directed actions such as careers. Beauvoir, however, endorses an “Ethic of Ambiguity” that makes her more skeptical about the prospects of carrying out lifelong projects without deluding oneself. (...) Our study teases apart the strengths and drawbacks of these views. (shrink)

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete literary world. (...) To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in "Literature and Metaphysics" envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a "philosophical appeal" (Beauvoir 2004b). In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work (Beauvoir 1954). A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon (...) 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself. (shrink)