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Abstract

This literature review presents seven major works on Durkheim written by leading Chinese researchers and published during the last 10 years. Some of them try to analyse Durkheim's views in order to understand contemporary Chinese society, by questioning what Durkheim teaches us about moral education, or by examining his conception of the nation. Others are more in the nature of scholarly commentary on his theory, whether by examining notions of anomie, the division of labour, suicide or a moral science.

Abstract

This paper examines how Sartre's early phenomenological works were influenced by Emmanuel Levinas's The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. Sartre embraced two key aspects of Levinas's interpretation of Husserl: 1) that phenomenology is an ontological philosophy whose foundation is the doctrine of intentionality; and, 2) that consciousness's being consists in intentionality, which entails that consciousness is non-substantial as well as pre-reflectively or non-thetically aware of itself. In addition to adopting these views, Sartre also became gripped by a methodological problem raised by Levinas. Namely, phenomenology reflects on consciousness, yet reflection modifies the consciousness it reflects on. I argue that Sartre responds to this problem by developing two of Levinas's ideas: that reflection is a motivated act and that reflection must adequately grasp consciousness's temporality.

Abstract

I have two aims: to analyze Jonathan Webber's analysis of bad faith and compare it to my own, traditional, account and to show that Webber's focus on character, as a set of dispositions or character traits that incline but do not determine us to view the world and behave in certain ways, contributes further to understanding Sartre's ‘bad faith’. Most Sartre scholars have ignored any emphasis on ‘character’. What is distinctive and emphatic in Webber's interpretation is his insistence ‘on bad faith’ as a ‘social disease’ distorting the way one views, interprets, and even thinks about the world. (Matt Eshleman also moves in this direction). But, again, this pattern is not deterministic. Early in his work, Webber tells us that Sartre does not claim that we have bad faith by ‘ascribing character traits where there are none but by pretending to ourselves that we have ‘fixed natures’ that e.g. preclude the behaviour or character trait of which one is being accused.

Though hardly disagreeing radically with Webber (or he with me) I do offer critical considerations. While Webber focuses on character, I focus on Sartre's contention that the ‘most basic’ or ‘first act’ of bad faith is ‘to flee from what [the human being] cannot flee, from what it is’, specifically human freedom. And I disagree partially with Webber's articulation of the ‘spirit of seriousness’, and strongly with both Sartre's and his supporting claim that bad faith cannot be cynical. I also demur from Webber's overemphasis on the ‘social’. For me, the root of all bad faith is our primitive ontological condition; namely, that at its very ‘upsurge’, human reality, anguished by its ‘reflective apprehension’ of its freedom and lack of Being, is disposed to flee from its nothingness in pursuit of identity, substantiality - in short, Being.

George Pattison and Kate Kirkpatrick, The Mystical Sources of Existentialist Thought: Being, Nothingness, Love (New York: Routledge, 2019) 228 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1138092372 (hardback)

Oliver Davis and Colin Davis, eds, Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019) vii +216 pp. ISBN: 978-178188-7332 (hardback)

Abstract

This is a review of the concept corporate sustainability. Being the most widely discussed and deliberated topic in the management and corporate literature, this concept has been defined by many academic scholars with their own specific approach. This article makes an attempt to review these approaches and will examine them in the context of the principles of the social quality approach (SQA). The progress and relevance of the United Nation's 2030 sustainable development is also reviewed. The conceptual and methodological redefinition given by SQA scholars and the reasons for their rejection of the tripartite approach to defining sustainability provided in the UN Brundtland Report is also discussed in order to provide a basis for further research into the issue of sustainability and how it relates to the SQA.

Abstract

This article surveys most of the recent reviews of Sarah Richmond's excellent new translation of L'Être et le néant. It offers some close textual comparisons between Richmond's translation, Hazel Barnes’ translation, and the Checklist of Errors of Hazel Barnes’ Translation of L'Être et le néant. This article concludes that Richmond delivers a higher semantic resolution translation that overcomes nearly all the liabilities found in Barnes and does so without sacrificing much by way of readability.