Sartre
A Philosophical Biography

The first book-length study of Sartre as philosopher of the imaginary and the development of his philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political thought.

Thomas R. Flynn (Author)

9781107476011, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 January 2019

448 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 2 cm, 0.74 kg

'His book belongs in the collection of any college or university with a philosophy program, and on the shelf (and in the hands) of any serious student of Sartre or twentieth-century philosophy.' Lance Byron Richey, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Regarded as the father of existentialist philosophy, he was also a political critic, moralist, playwright, novelist, and author of biographies and short stories. Thomas R. Flynn provides the first book-length account of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, mapping the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, and building a narrative that is not only philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary dimensions of his work. Exploring Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology, this book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and politics with an 'egoless' consciousness. It will appeal to all who are interested in Sartre's philosophy and its relation to his life.

1. The childhood of a genius
2. An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher
3. Teaching in the Lycée, 1931–1939
4. First triumph: The Imagination
5. Consciousness as imagination
6. The necessity of contingency: Nausea
7. The war years, 1939–1944
8. Bad faith in human life: Being and Nothingness
9. Existentialism: the fruit of liberation
10. Ends and means: existential ethics
11. Means and ends: political existentialism
12. A theory of history: Search for a Method
13. Individuals and groups: Critique of Dialectical Reason
14. A second ethics?
15. Existential biography: Flaubert and others
Conclusion: the Sartrean imaginary, chastened but indomitable.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Psychology [JM], History of ideas [JFCX], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology [HPJ], Phenomenology & Existentialism [HPCF3], Philosophy [HP], Literature & literary studies [D]