Jean-paul sartre philosophy

Jean-paul sartre cause of death
Jean-paul sartre famous works
Jean-paul sartre wife

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Jean-Paul Sartre

(1905-1980)

Synopsis

Born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France, Jean-Paul Sartre was a pioneering intellectual and proponent of existentialism who championed leftist causes in France and other countries. He wrote a number of books, including the highly influential Being and Nothingness, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964, though he turned it down. He had a relationship with noted intellectual Simone de Beauvoir.

Early Life

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. Sartre lost his father in infancy. After her husband’s death, Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon to raise her son.

As a young man, Sartre became interested in philosophy after reading Henri Bergson’s essay “Time and Free Will.” He earned a doctorate in philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, absorbing ideas from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, among others.

In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, a student at the Sorbonne who went on to become a c

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Jean-Paul Sartre

1. Life and Works

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux (and, subsequently, Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness, summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his own childhood in Words (1964a)—in which Sartre applies to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby complicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in 1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age of extremes”, a period that was als

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The first volume in the Lives of the Left series, Annie Cohen-Solal’s Sartre is a remarkable achievement. “A sensation” upon its initial publication in France, as the New York Times reported, Sartre was subsequently translated into sixteen languages and went on to become an international bestseller, appealing to the broadest audience. First published in the United States in 1987, it is the definitive biography of a man and an age, an intimate portrait of a complex life.

A major accomplishment of this biography is that it places Sartre in the context of history while at the same time reassessing the full import of his literary and political accomplishments. Discovering untold aspects of Sartre’s private and political life, Cohen-Solal weaves together all the elements of an exceptional career. From the fascinating description of his hitherto-unknown father to the painful last moments of Sartre’s own declining years, this is biography on the grandest scale, fully deserving of the praise it has received.