Simone de Beauvoir
- LAST REVIEWED: 25 March 2020
- LAST MODIFIED: 25 March 2020
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0277
- LAST REVIEWED: 25 March 2020
- LAST MODIFIED: 25 March 2020
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0277
Introduction
Simone de Beauvoir (b. 9 January 1908–d. 14 April 1986) contributed to shaping the philosophical movement of French existential phenomenology. But recognition of her importance as a philosopher has come mostly since her death. The delay resulted from the convergence of two factors. One was the sexism that ruled Western intellectual culture; the other was Beauvoir’s close half-century working relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which meant that all the ideas that they publicly shared could, given the dominance of sexism, automatically be attributed to him. By the time of Beauvoir’s death sexism’s grip on intellectual culture was, thanks in part to her book The Second Sex, beginning to weaken. Also beginning in 1983 the voluminous diaries and letters of Beauvoir and Sartre were published, which revealed in chronological detail the her/him origins of the philosophical ideas that they so famously shared. These developments led to an increasing proportion of Beauvoir scholarship focused on her work and role as a philosopher. Continental philosophy tends to be more inclusive with regard to literary form than does the analytical tradition. This is especially true of its phenomenological branch, which includes existentialism, the school to which Beauvoir belonged and helped develop. This inclusiveness stems directly from the method of discovery employed by phenomenological philosophers. One of Beauvoir’s foundational ideas was that the universal point of view is, as with everyone else, not available to the philosopher. Instead, thought begins from individual points of view and then proceeds on the basis of inductive generalization. This emphasis on the particular and the concrete, from which philosophical propositions may be drawn, invites the use of fiction as a medium for philosophical discovery, especially at the ontological level. For this reason and because traditional publishing platforms for philosophers were not generally open to women, Beauvoir used this method extensively. Beauvoir’s primary focus in the earliest stage of her philosophical work was on the structure of human consciousness: how it relates to itself, how it relates to the physical world, and, most especially, on the problem of the existence of other human consciousnesses. She developed her theory of the Other from the experience of finding oneself the object of the other’s gaze. The second stage of Beauvoir’s philosophical work, reflecting her experience of living under the Nazi occupation, moves from the metaphysical and moral solipsism of She Came to Stay to focus on the ethical implications of relationships with the Other. In the third and final stage, Beauvoir returned to her earlier focus on the structure of human consciousness to work on the problem of ontological commonalities among individuals who share social and historical situations. In The Second Sex she originated a theory of the structural variability of pre-reflective consciousness to describe women’s experience as the Other in a sexist society. Later, she applied a similar approach to condemn the treatment of the aged poor in Old Age.
General Overviews
Introductions, the first of this section’s five subheadings, includes books that focus on Beauvoir’s philosophy as a whole. Anthologies features collections of scholarly articles dealing with a wide range of the subject matters that Beauvoir dealt with as a philosopher. Because Beauvoir’s work and life as a philosopher were to an unusual degree historically contingent, we have included a short Historical Studies section of books that place her work in a historical context. The Bibliographies and Biographies headings are self-explanatory.
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- Causation
- Cavendish, Margaret
- Certainty
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- Davidson, Donald
- de Beauvoir, Simone
- de Montaigne, Michel
- Death
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- Derrida, Jacques
- Descartes, René
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- Dewey, John
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- Dutch Book Arguments
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- Emotion
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- Evil
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- Externalism and Internalism in the Philosophy of Mind
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- Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
- Fiction
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- Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
- Film, Philosophy of
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- Foucault, Michel
- Free Will
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- Gadamer, Hans-Georg
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- Grice, Paul
- Habermas, Jürgen
- Hart, H. L. A.
- Heaven and Hell
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Aesthetics
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Metaphysics
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Philosophy of History
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- Heidegger, Martin: Early Works
- Hermeneutics
- Higher Education, Philosophy of
- History, Philosophy of
- Hobbes, Thomas
- Horkheimer, Max
- Human Rights
- Hume, David: Aesthetics
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- Husserl, Edmund
- Idealizations in Science
- Identity in Physics
- Images
- Imagination
- Imagination and Belief
- Immanuel Kant: Political and Legal Philosophy
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- Incommensurability in Science
- Indian Philosophy
- Indispensability of Mathematics
- Inductive Reasoning
- Infinitism
- Instruments in Science
- Intellectual Humility
- Intentionality, Collective
- Intuitions
- James, William
- Japanese Philosophy
- Kant and the Laws of Nature
- Kant, Immanuel: Aesthetics and Teleology
- Kant, Immanuel: Ethics
- Kant, Immanuel: Theoretical Philosophy
- Kierkegaard, Søren
- Knowledge
- Knowledge-first Epistemology
- Knowledge-How
- Kristeva, Julia
- Kuhn, Thomas S.
- Lacan, Jacques
- Lakatos, Imre
- Langer, Susanne
- Language of Thought
- Language, Philosophy of
- Latin American Philosophy
- Laws of Nature
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- Legal Philosophy
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- Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
- Levinas, Emmanuel
- Lewis, C. I.
- Liberty
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- Locke, John
- Locke, John: Identity, Persons, and Personal Identity
- Logic
- Lottery and Preface Paradoxes, The
- Lucretius
- Machiavelli, Niccolò
- Martin Heidegger: Later Works
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- Marx, Karl
- Material Constitution
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- McDowell, John
- McTaggart, John
- Meaning of Life, The
- Mechanisms in Science
- Medically Assisted Dying
- Medicine, Contemporary Philosophy of
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- Nietzsche, Friedrich
- Nonexistent Objects
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- Occasionalism
- Olfaction
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- Ordinary Objects
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- Perception, Cognition, Action
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- Personal Identity
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- Plato
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- Propositions
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- Punishment
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- Realization
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- Reference, Theory of
- Reid, Thomas
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- Religious Experience
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- Ricoeur, Paul
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- Rorty, Richard
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
- Rule-Following
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- Ryle, Gilbert
- Sartre, Jean-Paul
- Schopenhauer, Arthur
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- Scientific Progress
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- Self-Knowledge
- Sellars, Wilfrid
- Semantic Externalism
- Semantic Minimalism
- Semiotics
- Seneca
- Senses, The
- Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology
- Shepherd, Mary
- Singular Thought
- Situated Cognition
- Situationism and Virtue Theory
- Skepticism, Contemporary
- Skepticism, History of
- Slurs, Pejoratives, and Hate Speech
- Smith, Adam: Moral and Political Philosophy
- Social Aspects of Scientific Knowledge
- Social Epistemology
- Social Identity
- Sounds and Auditory Perception
- Space and Time
- Speech Acts
- Spinoza, Baruch
- Stebbing, Susan
- Strawson, P. F.
- Structural Realism
- Suicide
- Supererogation
- Supervenience
- Tarski, Alfred
- Technology, Philosophy of
- Testimony, Epistemology of
- Theoretical Terms in Science
- Thomas Aquinas' Philosophy of Religion
- Thought Experiments
- Time and Tense
- Time Travel
- Toleration
- Torture
- Transcendental Arguments
- Tropes
- Trust
- Truth
- Truth and the Aim of Belief
- Truthmaking
- Turing Test
- Two-Dimensional Semantics
- Understanding
- Uniqueness and Permissiveness in Epistemology
- Utilitarianism
- Vagueness
- Value of Knowledge
- Vienna Circle
- Virtue Epistemology
- Virtue Ethics
- Virtues, Epistemic
- Virtues, Intellectual
- Voluntarism, Doxastic
- War
- Weakness of Will
- Weil, Simone
- Well-Being
- William of Ockham
- Williams, Bernard
- Wisdom
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Early Works
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Later Works
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Middle Works
- Wollstonecraft, Mary