Jean-Paul Sartre

1905-1980 · French · Phenomenology, Existentialism, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Literary Theory

Man is condemned to be free, and from the moment he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.

Growing up in his grandfather's library, Sartre absorbed books before the world — and spent much of his life outrunning the literary vocation that childhood planted in him. He studied Husserl in Berlin, wrote Nausea, and composed Being and Nothingness under the German Occupation in 1943.

Topics Jean-Paul Sartre addresses

• bad faith
• pour-soi and en-soi
• radical freedom
• existence precedes essence
• the look
• anguish
• nothingness
• facticity
• the pre-reflective cogito
• existential psychoanalysis
• the fundamental project
• pratico-inert
• group-in-fusion and series
• committed literature
• the singular universal
• shame before the other
• concrete relations with others
• the rejection of the transcendental ego
• consciousness as nothingness
• situated freedom
• the waiter in bad faith
• love as impossibility
• anticolonial violence as reclamation of humanity
• the quarrel with Camus

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