Being and Nothingness is without doubt one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The central work by one of the world's most influential thinkers, it altered the course of western philosophy. Its revolutionary approach challenged all previous assumptions about the individual's relationship with the world. Known as 'the Bible of existentialism', its impact on culture and literature was immediate and was felt worldwide, from the absurd drama of Samuel Beckett to the soul-searching cries of the Beat poets. (...) Being and Nothingness is one of those rare books whose influence has affected the mind-set of subsequent generations. Sixty years after its first publication, its message remains as potent as ever - challenging the reader to confront the fundamental dilemmas of human freedom, responsibility and action. (shrink)

Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God -- to which a large part of the book is devoted -- and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, (...) the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic. Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published. Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Each of the books that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was unique, and to this day each continues to provoke fresh thought and interpretations. This was never more true than for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she first used the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her consternation over how a man who was neither a monster nor a demon could nevertheless be an agent of the most extreme evil evoked derision, outrage, and (...) misunderstanding. The firestorm of controversy prompted Arendt to readdress fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of this book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”; in it Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing, and she examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed. Responsibility and Judgment is an essential work for understanding Arendt’s conception of morality; it is also an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time. (shrink)

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy. In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness , Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here (...) for the first time in English, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works. Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States. With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , and The Freud Scenario , both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his.

The author explores the views of two famous philosophers and one-time lovers about the self-other relation, particularly in the context of romantic love. In Being and nothingness , Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that any mode of relation between two subjectivities is doomed to fail. One of these modes is love, which is the desire to possess another freedom without altering its fundamental characteristic as a freedom. In contrast to Sartre, meanwhile, Simone de Beauvoir hints at the possibility of non-possessive reciprocal (...) relations in her philosophical novel, She came to stay . In light of such considerations as the relationship between love and the construction of self, and that between love and freedom, Dela Cruz evaluates the respective merits of the two thinkers’ views. She concludes the paper with a brief analysis of the lyrics of a contemporary song performed by Seal, entitled “Love’s Divine.” The song has an existential theme as it links love with the naming of another subjectivity: “Give me love, love is what I need to help me know my name.”. (shrink)

Emotion is traditionally described as a phenomenon that dominates the subject because one does not choose to be angry, sad, or happy. However, would it be totally absurd to conceive emotion as behaviour and a manifestation of the spontaneity and liberty of consciousness? In his short text, Esquisse d''une theorie des émotions, Sartre proposes a phenomenological description of this psychological phenomenon. He distinguishes between constituted affectivity, which gives rise to emotions, and an original affectivity lacking intentionality, and tied closely to (...) bodily processes. It appears that emotion is first and foremost a magical attitude toward the world, an attitude freely adopted by the subject. Against what is often written, this thesis doesn''t mean that emotion would be a pure comedy but only that, in spite of appearances, this behaviour isn''t a matter of what Descartes calls soul''s passions. (shrink)

Indispensable for students of Beauvoir’s philosophy and existentialism, Vintges’s book will prove valuable as well in courses on ethics, postmodernism, and feminist theory." —Ethics "... a highly informative book." —Teaching ...

The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now republished in two volumes with major original ...

... Let me start my investigation by taking a brief look at the way in which self-awareness is expressed linguistically, as in the sentences "I am tired" or ...

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had (...) been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women. This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers. (shrink)

The conceptions of jealousy used by philosophical writers are various, and, this paper suggests, largely inadequate. In particular, the difference between jealousy and envy has not yet been plausibly specified. This paper surveys some past analyses of this distinction and addresses problems with them, before proposing its own positive account of jealousy, developed from an idea of Leila Tov-Ruach(a.k.a. A. O. Rorty). Three conditions for being jealous are proposed and it is shownhow each of them helps to tell the emotion (...) apart from some distinct species of envy.It is acknowledged that the referents of the two terms are, to some extent, overlapping,but shown how this overlap is justified by the psychologies of the respective emotions. (shrink)