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10 results

  • The Global Role of US Philosophy

  • William L. McBride
  • Journal:
    Diogenes / Volume 51 / Issue 3 / August 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 February 2024, pp. 91-98
    • Article
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  • This essay focuses on the danger of complicity. American philosophers, given their country's hegemonic position, exert global influence; what form should it take? Comparison is made with the situation of France when it still controlled Algeria. French philosophers, until near the time of Algerian independence, generally accepted and sometimes profited from this extremely unjust situation. An important exception was Sartre, particularly in his Preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It is argued that elements of complicity with American global dominance, some of the more unjust aspects of which are listed, are to be found in such widely read philosophers as Rawls and Rorty. It is suggested that a rethinking of the problem of evil, in its political and not just its religious aspects, is in order. Finally, a broader view of what ‘American philosophy’ means, including, for instance, the voices of African American and Native American philosophers, is urged.

  • 15 - Politics and the engaged intellectual

  • from Part III - ETHICS AND POLITICS
  • Edited by Steven Churchill, Jack Reynolds, La Trobe University, Australia
  • Book:
    Jean-Paul Sartre
    Published by:
    Acumen Publishing
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    30 September 2013, pp 173-183

  • Summary

    Having been relatively apolitical during the early stages of his career – he spent a fellowship year in Berlin soon after Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor without showing much apparent interest in what was beginning to take place in the political realm – Sartre became, in the years following the Second World War, the quintessential public intellectual. The chronology of his path is well documented, and it is intertwined with the evolution of his philosophy. In this chapter, that path will be quickly retraced, with brief pauses at some of its most salient markers.

    Sartre's path to political engagement

    Sartre had a fairly strong sense of identification with his generation; he was not alone in regarding it, in retrospect, as the “between the wars generation”. His studies dominated his life in the years immediately following the First World War, and he then performed eighteen months of military service, compulsory for French males, as a meteorologist. His first career appointment was at the lycée in Le Havre, where he taught philosophy for several years before and after his time in Germany. Meanwhile, he was undertaking various writing ventures, with mixed success, including the ongoing rewriting of the novel, eventually entitled Nausea, which, when finally published in 1938, brought him considerable acclaim. Little by little, political realities began increasingly to impinge on his consciousness and his life.