Rethinking Beauvoir
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Abstract
I have been invited to respond to Rethinking Existentialism's engagement with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and I do so in three parts. First, I introduce Webber's Beauvoir, moral theorist, and raise some textual and conceptual objections to his argument for a ‘categorical imperative for authenticity’ in Chapter 10. Second, I turn to historical and conceptual challenges to Webber's definition of existentialism, including meta-philosophical questions about his use of literature in general and Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay in particular. Finally, I conclude with a trio of broad questions relating to what I will call the ‘missing materiality’ in Webber's Beauvoir: Where's the ambiguity? Where's the tragedy? Where's the tension?
Contributor Notes
Kate Kirkpatrick is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Regent's Park College, Oxford. She is the author of several articles and books on the philosophy of Sartre and Beauvoir, and of the biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019).