Revue internationale de philosophie, 2026/2, Vol. 316 : "Simone de Beauvoir"
In her “Preface” to L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations [Existentialism and Popular Wisdom] (1948), Simone de Beauvoir views attacks on the then-new philosophy of existentialism as rooted less in a preference for one philosophical system over another than in a rejection of the stringencies of philosophy tout court. [1] Beauvoir prizes philosophy for its unremitting capacity to pose questions, and more specifically for the often ruthless manner in which it interrogates the doxai of the dominant bourgeois culture, those inherited assumptions or “platitudes” she refers to by the collective term “popular wisdom” (la sagesse des nations). [2] The latter are characterized by a pre- and anti-philosophical inconsistency, that is, by an intellectual dishonesty and bad faith that it is the responsibility of every individual to subject to rigorous scrutiny. “Man cannot escape philosophy,” she writes, “because he cannot escape his freedom, which implies questioning and refusal of the given.” If this process of (self-)reflection is an inevitably uncomfortable and painful one, it is also politically fraught, hence why Beauvoir concludes that all “organized thought,” from Socrates onwards, has been subject to open ridicule and reproach. […]
Contents
Introduction: Thinking with Beauvoir
Par Paul Earlie
Rethinking the Method of “Lived Experience”: Simone de Beauvoir’s Critical Social Philosophy
Par Katja Čičigoj
Childhood, Seriousness, and Terror in the Modern World: A Reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
The Antinomy of Cancel Culture: A Study of Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer*
Par Kelli Fuery
“If You Are Truly on the Left”:
Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan on (Paid and Unpaid) Labour
Par Emma McNicol
Is Femininity Solely Patriarchal? Revealing Some Tensions in The Second Sex