Simone de Beauvoir –– A Humanist Thinker

Simone de Beauvoir –– A Humanist Thinker PDF Author:
Publisher: Hotei Publishing
ISBN: 9004294465
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This collection of humanist readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s work is a novel contribution to contemporary research on Beauvoir, and a defense of the importance of the humanities. It demonstrates the significance and value of humanistic research through the work of Beauvoir, and argues that the reception and influence of her works demonstrate the transformative potential of humanistic research. Organized around three topics, each chapter ascertains Beauvoir’s relation to the humanities and the humanist tradition. The first group focuses on Beauvoir’s interdisciplinary methodology and critical thinking, the second on her ethics of freedom and the construction of values. The last section explores how Beauvoir uses literature as a laboratory for developing her ideas on human interaction. The chapters can be studied as independent essays, or read together as a whole. Simone de Beauvoir—A Humanist Thinker reveals new and previously unexplored dimensions of Beauvoir’s work by exposing her as a significant and inspiring humanist thinker. This volume attests that Beauvoir’s works continue to offer conceptual tools and insights enabling readers to critically analyze their own situation. In today’s world, where religious fanaticism and totalitarian ideologies are gaining ground, humanist values and humanistic research are more important than ever.

Simone de Beauvoir –– A Humanist Thinker

Simone de Beauvoir –– A Humanist Thinker PDF Author:
Publisher: Hotei Publishing
ISBN: 9004294465
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of humanist readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s work is a novel contribution to contemporary research on Beauvoir, and a defense of the importance of the humanities. It demonstrates the significance and value of humanistic research through the work of Beauvoir, and argues that the reception and influence of her works demonstrate the transformative potential of humanistic research. Organized around three topics, each chapter ascertains Beauvoir’s relation to the humanities and the humanist tradition. The first group focuses on Beauvoir’s interdisciplinary methodology and critical thinking, the second on her ethics of freedom and the construction of values. The last section explores how Beauvoir uses literature as a laboratory for developing her ideas on human interaction. The chapters can be studied as independent essays, or read together as a whole. Simone de Beauvoir—A Humanist Thinker reveals new and previously unexplored dimensions of Beauvoir’s work by exposing her as a significant and inspiring humanist thinker. This volume attests that Beauvoir’s works continue to offer conceptual tools and insights enabling readers to critically analyze their own situation. In today’s world, where religious fanaticism and totalitarian ideologies are gaining ground, humanist values and humanistic research are more important than ever.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity PDF Author: Sonia Kruks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195381440
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity is the first full-length study of Beauvoir's political thinking. Best known as the author of The Second Sex, Beauvoir also wrote an array of other political and philosophical texts that together, constitute an original contribution to political theory and philosophy. Sonia Kruks here locates Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context and demonstrates her continuing significance. Beauvoir still speaks, in a unique voice, to many pressing questions concerning politics: the values and dangers of liberal humanism; how oppressed groups become complicit in their own oppression; how social identities are perpetuated; the limits to rationalism; and the place of emotions, such as the desire for revenge, in politics. In discussing such matters Kruks puts Beauvoir's ideas into conversation with those of many contemporary thinkers, including feminist and race theorists, as well as with historical figures in the liberal, Hegelian, and Marxist traditions. Beauvoir's political thinking emerges from her fundamental insights into the ambiguity of human existence. Combining phenomenological descriptions with structural analyses, she focuses on the tensions of human action as both free and constrained. To be human is to be a paradoxical being, at once capable of free choice and yet, because embodied, vulnerable to injury from others. Politics is thus a domain of complexly interwoven, multiple, human interactions that is rife with ambiguity, and where freedom and violence too often closely intertwine. Beauvoir accordingly argues that failure is a necessary part of political action. However, she also insists that, while acknowledging this, we should assume responsibility for the outcomes of what we do.

Emancipatory Thinking

Emancipatory Thinking PDF Author: Elaine Stavro
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773553924
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir’s political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it underpinned her activism and helped her navigate the dilemmas raised by revolutionary thought in the postwar period. In Emancipatory Thinking Elaine Stavro brings together Beauvoir’s philosophy and her political interventions to produce complex ideas on emancipation. Drawing from a range of work, including novels, essays, autobiographical writings, and philosophic texts, Stavro explains that for Beauvoir freedom is a movement that requires both personal and collective transformation. Freedom is not guaranteed by world historical systems, material structures, wilful action, or discursive practices, but requires engaged subjects who are able to take creative risks as well as synchronize with existing forces to work towards collective change. Beauvoir, Stavro asserts, resisted the trend of anti-humanism that has dominated French thinking since the 1960s and also managed to avoid the pitfalls of voluntarism and individualism. In fact, Stavro argues, Beauvoir appreciated the impact of material, socio-economic, institutional forces, without forgoing the capacity to initiate. Applying Beauvoir’s existential insights and understanding of embodied and situated subjectivity to recent debates within gender, literary, sociological, cultural, and political studies, Emancipatory Thinking provides a lens to explore the current political and theoretical landscape.

Philosophy as Passion

Philosophy as Passion PDF Author: Karen Vintges
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253210708
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Philosophy as Passion refutes the commonly held view of Simone de Beauvoir as no more than an acolyte of Jean-Paul Sartre. Karen Vintges delineates Beauvoir's independent, original ethics and philosophy, drawing on the moral philosophical treatises of the 1940's and 1950's along with The Second Sex, her novel The Mandarins, and autobiographical works.

Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking

Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking PDF Author: Lori Jo Marso
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252073592
Category : Feminism and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
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A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir

A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir PDF Author: Laura Hengehold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118795970
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title! The work of Simone de Beauvoir has endured and flowered in the last two decades, thanks primarily to the lasting influence of The Second Sex on the rise of academic discussions of gender, sexuality, and old age. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to her life and writings, an international assembly of prominent scholars, essayists, and leading interpreters reflect upon the range of Beauvoir’s contribution to philosophy as one of the great authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. The Companion examines Beauvoir’s rich intellectual life from a variety of angles—including literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives—and situates her in relation to her forbears and contemporaries in the philosophical canon. Essays in each of four thematic sections reveal the breadth and acuity of her insight, from the significance of The Second Sex and her work on the metaphysics of gender to her plentiful contributions in ethics and political philosophy. Later chapters trace the relationship between Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary work and open up her scholarship to global issues, questions of race, and the legacy of colonialism and sexism. The volume concludes by considering her impact on contemporary feminist thought writ large, and features pioneering work from a new generation of Beauvoir scholars. Ambitious and unprecedented in scope, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource for students, teachers, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking

Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking PDF Author: Lori Marso
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252055977
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking. As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria. Here, she sees her role as an oppressor. In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality. This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.

Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe PDF Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679724516
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir PDF Author: Ursula Tidd
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861897537
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Following its publication in 1949, The Second Sex quickly became one of the fundamental works of feminist thought. In it, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) offered up a statement that has informed nearly all feminist and gender scholarship that has followed, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” And it is the woman Beauvoir became who continues to fascinate, fostering a legend of coffee-drinking Parisian intellectuals debating existentialism in smoky cafes along the Left Bank. Beauvoir lived through some of the most dramatic and significant events of the twentieth century, and a time of enormous change for women across the world. Her personal and intellectual companions were one and the same—and as a result, her intimate relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Nelson Algren provide a captivating context to the development of her ideas. In this concise and up-to-date critical appraisal of both the life and words of Beauvoir, Ursula Tidd illuminates the many facets of the feminist icon’s complex personality, including her relentless autobiographical drive, which led her to envision her life as a continuously unfolding narrative, her active involvement in twentieth-century political struggles, and how Beauvoir the woman has over the decades become Beauvoir the myth. 2008 marked the centenary of Beauvoir’s birth, yet her ideas continue to reverberate throughout contemporary scholarship. This critical biography will benefit any reader seeking insight into one of the most prominent and intriguing intellectuals of the twentieth century.

The Bonds of Freedom

The Bonds of Freedom PDF Author: Kristana Arp
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 9780812694437
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
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.