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This dramatic re-evaluation of Sartre’s ethical theory establishes its author as a leading American exponent of phenomenology and wins many new followers for Sartre in the English-speaking world.

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Phenomenology is one of the most important and influential philosophical movements of the last one hundred years. It began in 1900, with the publication of a massive two-volume work, Logical Investigations, by a Czech-German mathematician, Edmund Husserl. It proceeded immediately to exert a strong influence on both philosophy and the social sciences. For example, phenomenology provided the central inspiration for the existentialist movement, as represented by such figures as Martin Heidegger in Germany and Jean-Paul Sartre in France. Subsequent intellectual currents in Europe, when they have not claimed phenomenology as part of their ancestry, have defined themselves in opposition to phenomenology. Thus, to give just one example, the first two works of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, were devoted to criticisms of Husserl’s phenomenological works. In the English-speaking world, where “analytic philosophy” dominates, phenomenology has recently emerged as a hot topic after decades of neglect. This has resulted from a dramatic upswing in interest in consciousness, the condition that makes all experience possible. Since the special significance of phenomenology is that it investigates consciousness, analytic philosophers have begun to turn to it as an underutilized resource. For the same reason, Husserl’s work is now widely studied by cognitive scientists. The current revival of interest in phenomenology also stems from the recognition that not every kind of question can be approached by means of experimental techniques. Not all questions are scientific in that sense. Thus, if there is to be knowledge in logic, mathematics, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology (theory of knowledge), psychology (from the inside), and the study of consciousness, among others, another method is clearly needed. Phenomenology is an attempt to rectify this. Its aim is to focus on the world as given in experience, and to describe it with unprecedented care, rigor, subtlety, and completeness. This applies not only to the objects of sense experience, but to all phenomena: moral, aesthetic, political, mathematical, and so forth. One can avoid the obscure problem of the real, independent existence of the objects of experience in these domains by focusing instead on the objects, as experienced, themselves, along with the acts of consciousness which disclose them. Phenomenology thus opens up an entirely new field of investigation, never previously explored. Rather than assuming, or trying to discern, what exists outside the realm of the mental, and what causal relations pertain to these extra-mental entities, we can study objects strictly as they are given, that is, as they appear to us in experience. This book explains what phenomenology is and why it is important. It focuses primarily on the works and ideas of Husserl, but also discusses important later thinkers, giving special emphasis to those whose contributions are most relevant to contemporary concerns. Finally, while Husserl’s greatest contributions were to the philosophical foundations of logic, mathematics, knowledge, and science, this book also addresses extensively the relatively neglected contribution of phenomenology to value theory, especially ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

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The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was the major representative of the philosophical movement called “existentialism,” and he remains by far the most famous philosopher, worldwide, of the post–World War Two era.This book will provide readers with all the help they will need to find their own way in Sartre’s works. Author David Detmer provides a clear, accurate, and accessible guide to Sartre’s work, introducing readers to all of his major theories, explaining the ways in which the different strands of his thought are interrelated, and offering an overview of several of his most important works.Sartre was an extraordinarily versatile and prolific writer. His gigantic corpus includes novels, plays, screenplays, short stories, essays on art, literature, and politics, an autobiography, several biographies of other writers, and two long, dense, complicated, systematic works of philosophy (Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason). His treatment of philosophical issues is spread out over a body of writing that many find highly intimidating because of its size, diversity, and complexity.A distinctive feature of this book is that it is comprehensive. The vast majority of books on Sartre, including those that are billed as introductions to his work, are highly selective in their coverage. For example, many of them deal only with his early writings and neglect the massive and difficult Critique of Dialectical Reason, or they address only his philosophical work and ignore his novels and plays (or vice versa). The present book, by contrast, discusses works in all of Sartre’s literary genres and from all phases of his career.An introductory chapter provides an overview of Sartre’s life and work. The next chapter analyzes several of Sartre’s earliest philosophical writings. Each of the next six chapters is devoted to an in-depth examination of a single key book. Two of these chapters are devoted to philosophical works, two to plays, one to a biography, and one to a novel. These chapters also contain some discussion of other writings insofar as these are relevant to the topics under consideration there. A final chapter considers important concepts and theories that are not found in the major works discussed in earlier chapters, briefly introduces other important works of Sartre’s, and offers some final thoughts. The book concludes with a short annotated bibliography with suggestions for further reading.Central to all of Sartre’s writing was his attempt to describe the salient features of human existence: freedom, responsibility, the emotions, relations with others, work, embodiment, perception, imagination, death, and so forth. In this way he attempted to bring clarity and rigor to the murky realm of the subjective, limiting his focus neither to the purely intellectual side of life (the world of reasoning, or, more broadly, of thinking), nor to those objective features of human life that permit of study from the “outside.” Instead, he broadened his focus so as to include the meaning of all facets of human existence. Thus, his work addressed, in a fundamental way, and primarily from the “inside” (where Sartre’s skills as a novelist and dramatist served him well) the question of how an individual is related to everything that comprises his or her situation: the physical world, other individuals, complex social collectives, and the cultural world of artifacts and institutions.

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