Kate Kirkpatrick - Sartre, Beauvoir and existentialism

I’m the Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford.

My research focuses primarily on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and I've written a few books on Sartre and Beauvoir and Existentialism more generally.

About Kate Kirkpatrick I’m the Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford.

My research focuses primarily on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and I've written a few books on Sartre and Beauvoir and Existentialism more generally.

Key Points

• Sartre and Beauvoir’s view of Existentialism emerged in the 1940s. They thought that freedom is what is most valuable in life and that we must build an ethical system around it. • One of the ways that Sartre and Beauvoir expressed their ideas was through fiction. They wrote plays and novels because they thought that the truth couldn’t just be expressed in the form of philosophical treatises. • Beauvoir believes that the character of human beings is established by the kinds of projects that they adopt in life; part of being free is having the freedom to choose different projects to shape your life.

This question is still the subject of debate amongst philosophers today. On the one hand, you get very broad definitions of the category, which include thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily – people like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Heidegger, as well as French existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir. However, some philosophers claim that the category is so broad that it ceases to pick out any meaningful similarities between the thinkers, because, although they share similar preoccupations, they wrote from very different contexts and came to radically different conclusions.

On the other hand, you get this narrow approach to defining Existentialism, which has appeared in the work of Jonathan Webber more recently. He says that we need to understand Existentialism as a theory of value, which says that freedom is what is valuable, and as an ethical system built on that – that we must treat other people in a way that acknowledges the freedom of each person and the structure of human existence. That view is something that emerged with Sartre and Beauvoir in the 1940s.