Sartre Studies International

It is not the first time that this editorial page has drawn attention to the capacity of Sartre studies to fascinate and engage successive generations of scholars. In this issue they seek: to understand Sartre's intellectual genetics as an emerging scholar, to analyse how his thinking was formed and influenced by Descartes, and to evaluate how he was perceived as a public intellectual, and how he perceived himself. And also to dialogue on how Sartre's thought can provide a potentially positive lens through which to see a way through and beyond the current crisis in the Middle East.

Some thirty years ago, the metanarratives of Sartre's thinking entered their fourth stage, the genetical stage. An important subject of genetical study has become the period prior to the publication of L’être et le néant. This article examines what Sartre read in the 1920s and what formed his philosophical matrix, into which he later incorporated concepts from Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel (3Hs). An important result is that Sartre's main focus in the 1920s was already on the subject's freedom and the contingency of the world. In this respect, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Arthur Schopenhauer, the pragmatists and Karl Jaspers were more influential than the 3Hs, who were prominently present mainly in the writings of the 1940s. We can observe the importance of psychology and sociology for Sartre at that time, which later manifested itself in his psychological works of the 1930s and his biographies and socio-anthropological texts of the 1950s to the 1970s.

I argue that Sartre's conception of freedom is best understood when read in light of the Cartesian Meditations. Drawing on the often-neglected article on ‘Cartesian Freedom’, I demonstrate how Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, re-enacts the transition from the Third to Fourth Meditation – from the causal proof of God's existence to the problem of error and free will defence. Using a Cartesian-like distinction between objective and formal reality, Sartre argues for the ontological independence of the in-itself, committing to compatibilism about freedom. He addresses the Cartesian challenge of non-being and freedom as the ability to do otherwise, finally resolving the paradox of freedom by viewing situations as ambiguously shaped by absolute freedom and partial dependence on reality. Thus, my approach illuminates the historical and systematic depth of Sartre's middle ground between libertarianism and determinism.

Sartre remains an exemplary case for the sociology of intellectuals because of the unique way that he combined a prominent role in public life with achievements as a philosopher, novelist and playwright. Sartre's success has been examined by Patrick Baert through the lens of his theory of positioning, according to which specific actions and events serve to give a writer the edge in unfolding social games of recognition. This article argues that Baert's scepticism about Sartre's motives spills over into unwarranted cynicism and that this is made possible by methodological ambiguity surrounding the role of intentions in positioning theory. Baert's narrow periodisation of Sartre's success, and his insinuation that in the immediate post-occupation period Sartre betrayed his earlier philosophical ideas in pursuit of public attention are both rejected. At the same time the discussion finds that, detached from Baert's negative interpretation of Sartre, the idea of positioning may have potential for further development.

This conversation between Ronald Aronson and Jonathan Judaken explores Sartre's evolving views on anti-Semitism, Israel, racism, and the Palestinian struggle. Sartre first became a significant cultural-political force as a critic of anti-Semitism and as a supporter of the national liberation struggle of Israeli Jews. Then, faced with the Israeli-Arab and then the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he refused to abandon his support for Israeli Jews even while embracing the validity of the Palestinian cause, including at times the use of ‘terrorism as a weapon of the weak’. His nuanced, situated, and insightful views prove valuable to revisit in light of October 7 and the ensuing war.

Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann (eds), Simone de Beauvoir: Diary of a Philosophy Student, Volume 3, 1926–1930, trans. Barbara Klaw (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2024), xxvi, 249 pp. ISBN 978-0252045646

Robert Bernasconi, Critical Philosophy of Race: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), ix, 370 pp. ISBN 978-0197587966

Kathryn Sophia Belle, Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), vii, 353 pp. ISBN 978-0197660201

Timothy D. Mooney, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), xx, 251 pp. ISBN 978-1009223430

Joseph C. Berendzen, Embodied Idealism: Merleau-Ponty's Transcendental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 279 pp. ISBN 978-0192874764