This is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date surveys of the philosophy of Sartre, by some of the foremost interpreters in the United States and Europe. The essays are both expository and original, and cover Sartre's writings on ontology, phenomenology, psychology, ethics, and aesthetics, as well as his work on history, commitment, and progress; a final section considers Sartre's relationship to structuralism and deconstruction. Providing a balanced view of Sartre's philosophy and situating it in relation to contemporary trends in Continental philosophy, the volume shows that many of the topics associated with Lacan, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida are to be found in the work of Sartre, in some cases as early as 1936. A special feature of the volume is the treatment of the recently published and hitherto little studied posthumous works. Thus new readers and nonspecialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Sartre currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Sartre.

Table of Contents

Part I Phenomenology and existentialism 

1.Sartre's ontology: The revealing and making of being

2.Role-playing: Sartre's transformation of Husserl's phenomenology 

3.Individuality in Sartre's philosophy 

Part II Psychology and ethics 

4.Sartre's moral psychology 

5.Understanding the committed writer 

6.Sartrean ethics 

Part III History and structure 

7.Sartre and the poetics of history

8.Sartre on progress 

9 Sartrean Structuralism? 

Conclusion: Sartre and the deconstruction of the subject

Appendix: Hegel and Sartre 

About the Author

Christina Howells’s research work centres on Continental philosophy, literary theory, and twentieth-century French literature. She is particularly interested in post-war French thought, for example Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and Levinas. She has also published with Routledge a Reader of articles by twenty-eight contemporary French women philosophers. Her latest monograph explores ideas of subjectivity and mortality in late twentieth-century French thought, and, together with Gerald Moore, she has recently co-edited a collection of essays on Bernard Stiegler for EUP .