Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism does not occur in a vacuum. Granted, it is not a church or a prescriptive ideology, but it is born by a community into a community. Paul Tillich says it is the "natural ally of...

Sartre thought that meaning is essentially unfixed. Humans give an order and meaning to the world. We do not make the world, but we do give it meaning. To use the old example, if a tree falls in...

Reflecting his views on existential responsibility, in "What is Literature?", Sartre proposes that the author and reader ideally engage in a dialectical "going-and-coming" relationship: It is the...

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French writer, philosopher, and political activist who was widely influential in the burgeoning existentialist movement of the twentieth-century. Existentialists believe that...

What the quotation means is that the lives we lead, and what we put into them, are all that there is. As a militant atheist, Sartre did not believe that there was anything else beyond the...

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French writer and existentialist who was the recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature. Among the many topics Sartre examined in his voluminous writings...

What Sartre means by this is that we have absolute responsibility for our own lives, that we must live with the consequences of our free choices, and that if we are not prepared to do so then we...

The distinction between a choice in which the consequences fall on one's own shoulders and a choice in which the consequences fall on the shoulders of others is a meaningless distinction in the...

Sartre, in this collection of his essays, uses criticism of his own fiction for being political as a springboard to discuss the nature of literature. To do so, he makes a sharp distinction between...

What Sartre understands by freedom is the unique ability of human beings to rise above their given condition. Plants, rocks, and animals don't have this ability, only humans. Contrary to what...