Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Sartre

  • Sartre and Giacometti

    A New Criterion article by James Lord.  

  • A Minor Correction Anent ‘Absurd’ with a Little Help from Mark Rothko

    In a Substack entry I distinguished four senses of 'absurd,' the logico-mathematical, the semantic, the existential, and the ordinary. About the existential sense I had this to say: 3) Existential.  The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible.  The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Jean-Paul Sartre's…

  • The Strange Thought of Absolute Nothingness

    I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel. The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either!…

  • Their Cocks Make Them Sure

    There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we  know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. …

  • How Responsible is Sartre for the Decline of Continental Philosophy?

    A London philosopher sends the following along which I take to be a quotation from Jasbir Puar: One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber,…

  • The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

    You probably knew that Elizabeth Warren, aka Fauxcahontas, contributed recipes to the cookbook, Pow Wow Chow. You might even know that some have alleged that these recipes were plagiarized by the Indian maiden.  But I'll bet you don't know that Jean-Paul Sartre worked on a cookbook.  Another reason why you need to read my blog.…

  • Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

    From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only…

  • Sartrean Consciousness as Nothing and as Something: Contradiction?

    I put the following questions to Professor Butchvarov:  1. Are you troubled by the following apparent contradiction to which you are apparently committed, namely, that consciousness is both nothing and something? This (apparent) contradiction comes out clearly in your 1994 Midwest Studies in Philosophy paper "Direct Realism Without Materialism," p. 10. 2. You say above…

  • The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov’s Solution

    In his highly  original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015)  Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics.  These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward…

  • Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

    A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there…

  • Nausea at Existence

    Existence is often 'invisible' to  analytic types well-versed in logic, for existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana sagely remarked in Scepticism and Animal Faith  (Dover, 1955, p. 48) It is so odious, in fact, that they need to mask it under the misnamed 'existential' quantifier. So I need to resort to extreme…

  • How Roquentin Relieved His Nausea

    By listening to this song.  Art reveals pure ideality sans existence.

  • The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

    Recently discovered.  Warning: it may induce nausea. Excerpt: Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word "cake." I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may…

  • Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two

    Near the end of  Part One of this two-part series, I wrote, . . . Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in…

  • Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part One

    Suppose we divide theories of the meaning of human life into the exogenous and the endogenous. According to the exogenous theories, existential meaning derives from a source external to the agent, whereas on endogenous theories, meaning and purpose are posited or projected by the agent. Classical theism provides an example of an exogenous theory of…