Simone de Beauvoir published a number of philosophical essays and novels before writing The Second Sex. The most important of these was The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which she argues that one’s freedom is always intertwined with that of others. The Bonds of Freedom examines de Beauvoir’s ideas on ethics, demonstrating her importance in contemporary philosophy.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between (...) the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hypatia 14.4 (1999) 182-183 [Access article in PDF] Simone De Beauvoir Writing the Self: Philosophy Becomes Autobiography. By Jo-Ann Pilardi. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998. This book is a welcome contribution to Simone de Beauvoir studies and, more particularly, to critical studies of Beauvoir's autobiographical project. It aims to analyze "Beauvoir's notion of the self and its use within her auto-biographical writing" (Pilardi 1998, 1). This short study is (...) divided into six chapters. The first two chapters usefully explore Beauvoir's notions of selfhood, drawing on her moral essays of the 1940s, Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, as well as analyzing what Jo-Ann Pilardi terms the gendered self in The Second Sex. The following four chapters are concerned with how Beauvoir represents various notions of selfhood and existential themes in her four volumes of formal autobiography. As such, then, this is an ambitious project for it seeks to interrelate two substantial areas of Beauvoir's corpus and invites us to see how she developed her philosophical thinking through the representation of her singular life. The introduction and the first two chapters are particularly interesting for they attempt to tackle—in a regrettably brief discussion—what the self might be for the existential-phenomenological tradition and Beauvoir's own contribution to these debates. In the subsequent chapters, Pilardi relies too much on quotation from the primary autobiographical texts to make her points about selfhood, despite her recognition that autobiography is a literary construct. Given the importance of the Other in Beauvoir's notions about selfhood and literature, it is perhaps surprising that no discussion is included concerning the importance of the author-reader relation in the [End Page 182] production of the autobiographical self and how significant Others and readers constrain what it is possible for Beauvoir—in her situation as a woman writer—to represent in autobiography. References to some of Beauvoir's key statements on literature are absent here—such as her lecture "Mon expérience d'écrivain" or her contribution to the "Que peut la littérature?" debate published in 1965. This is perhaps unfortunate given the centrality of the notion of "writing the self" in this discussion. Moreover, the major impact of history on the development of Beauvoir's notion of self-Other relations—specifically her experience of the German Occupation of France during World War II—is only mentioned briefly in the last few pages of chapter 6. Yet this discovery of history is highly significant in terms of the central importance of testimony in Beauvoir's autobiography and her notion of the self's ethical obligation to the Other. On the whole, however, this text raises some useful issues about Beauvoir's notions of selfhood in the context of her formal autobiographical self-representation. Ursula Tidd Ursula Tidd is a lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages and a member of the Board of the European Studies Research Institute (ESRI) at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, England. She has published several articles on Simone de Beauvoir's writing. Her book, Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony, which explores Beauvoir's auto/biographical project in the context of her notions of selfhood, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. She is currently working on an edited book, Woman in Contemporary France, to be published by Berg Publishers (Oxford, UK). ([email protected]) Permission to reprint a book review from this selection may be obtained only from the author.... (shrink)

Challenges Beauvoir's self-portrait and argues that she was a philosopher in her own right.

Sara HeinSmaa rediscovers neglected passages of Le Duexi_me Sexe in her quest to follow Simone de Beauvoir's line of thinking. She finds the masterpiece to be grounded in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barr_s, Arthur Rimbaud, AndrZ Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invitZe.

" Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?

For the second edition of her landmark study of Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi provides a major new introduction discussing current developments in Beauvoir studies as well as the recent publication of papers and letters by Beauvoir, including her letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Agren, and her student diaries from 1926-7.

In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

In I Love to You , Luce Irigaray moves from the critique of patriarchy to an exploration of the ground for a possible inter-subjectivity between the two sexes. Continuing her rejection of demands for equality, Irigaray poses the question: how can we move to a new era of sexual difference in which women and men establish lasting relations with one another without reducing the other to the status of object? Drawing upon Hegel, Irigaray proposes a dialectic appropriate to each sex (...) as well as a dialectic of their relation. She argues for what she calls "sexed rights" and a right of persons based on the right to life, not the right to property. Using the results of her research into the sexing of language, Irigaray analyzes how women seek communication in discourse with the other--an other, pre-occupied with his abstract or concrete object, who does not respond. She proposes another syntax for communication, one that does not incorporate the other as the object of the subject but allows for an indirect relation. Thus "I love to you" replaces "I love you." In Irigaray's vision of the happiness possible in sexual difference, the love between a man and a woman finds its "reason" not in property or children, but in its own place within the couple. Arguing passionately for a new language of personal relations, I Love to You looks toward a future where nihilism can be overcome by "love in sexual difference.". (shrink)

Professor Deutscher studies Beauvoir's philosophy on "otherness" not just through her famous views on gender (in her celebrated 1949 work The...

"Safe sex" discourse attempts to protect women from dangers assumed inherent in erotic life, such as domination, submissiveness, and loss of freedom and self-control. However, Beauvoir's and Merleau-Ponty's revision of Sartre's ontology suggests that erotic life involves a kind of generosity that transforms existence; sex neither liberates personal existence nor poses a necessary threat to women's freedom. I also reconsider the conditions under which sex is assumed to involve a violation of being.

This article revisits Irigaray's theory of sexual difference in the light of more contemporary developments in terms of nomadic becomings and non-unitary subjectivity, especially in Deleuze. It defends the notion of embodied materiality on philosophical grounds, by linking it to the issues of power, access, hegemony and exclusion, which are central to post-structuralism. Through a detailed analysis of the sexual politics of difference feminism, the author argues for a non-reactive redefinition of the feminine as a project of becoming, and connects (...) it firmly to feminist discussions about gender and queer theory. (shrink)

This series presents issues which are central to 20th-century European thought, but unfamiliar to students of Anglo-American philosophy. In this book the author traces the development of the concept of situation through the work of Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

Hegel and Feminist Philosophy traces the legacy of Hegel in the work of thinkers such as de Beauvoir, Irigaray and Butler, and also in contemporary debates in ...