Simone de Beauvoir and Human Dignity (original) (raw)
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In her book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir raised some fundamental issues surrounding the oppression of women. She argues the case that women are still at the immanence sphere where they are subjected and oppressed. At this level, women exist as a being for the “Other” and not for themselves. She alarms that this stage is detrimental to women and also to their freedom as well as the society at large. Furthermore, and most important to our discussion, is her belief that there is a great need to liberate women from this immanent, oppressive, and degrading sphere, to the liberating transcendence sphere-where she could exist as “self”. This paper, therefore, is a philosophical examination of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of mystification of women and its possible significance to our contemporary society. It shows that de Beauvoir’s cry for women’s liberation is still not wipe out in our contemporary world. It also identifies de Beauvoir’s philosophy with deep philosophical importance for the possibility of arriving at the liberation of women in our contemporary world.
Simone De Beauvoir's Philosophical Sexism: Implications for the Philosophy of Posterity
In reflecting on the broad theme of the conference, WOMEN IN HISTORY, some of us with a background in philosophy readily identify philosophical sexism-the thought concerning the unfair treatment of people, especially women, because of their sex-with the women historical struggle for equality with men. Adopting this approach reminds us of Simone de Beauvoir, whose revolutionary work, The Second Sex, perhaps the greatest contribution to gender philosophy and a quondam literature in feminism and women studies, is the classical gender literature of all times. This literature provides the platform to reflect on the historical account of women, in terms of what is perceived as their unfair, unjust, oppressed, passive and alienated situation in society. It considers also the historical relegation of women to the passive acceptance of roles foisted on them by society. Beauvoir adopted the existentialist phenomenological methodology in considering the women condition, with the objective of reforming it for posterity. The philosophy of posterity-the thought concerning the quality of life bequeathable to the future generation of humanity-therefore, was one of the inspirations to Beauvoir"s project. The operating norm of posterity would be, "equality of the sexes." But philosophy of posterity has its own problems. Considering Derek Parfit"s paradox, for instance, different species of people may be occupying the world in future if conventions and traditions of today are dismantled to provide for such new norm and women"s freedom; people who, but for that provision would not have originally existed, would exist; people who may not even appreciate such historical efforts made on their behalf and, who would not reciprocate the same gesture in any way. It raises the question whether Beauvoir"s project, with its Heideggerian principle of "letting things be" as a definition of freedom, is necessary at all. Perhaps, more radically, it seems to threaten certain basic traditional tenets of human existence, such as the Confucian tenet of "rectification of names," where one answers to the role implication of his social position. Even so, Beauvoir"s project remains an invaluable contribution to humanity.
Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation: The Problem of The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation: The Problem of The Second Sex, 2017
This book presents a new, Deleuzian reading of Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology, the place of recognition in The Second Sex, the philosophical issues in her novels and the important role of her student diaries. Hengehold clarifies the elements of Deleuze's thought – alone and in collaboration with Guattari – that may be most useful to contemporary feminists who are simultaneously rethinking the becoming of gender and the becoming of philosophy. Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens encourages us to place more emphasis on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians.
SIMONE DE BEAUVIOR ON THE MYSTIFICATION OF WOMEN: AN APPRAISAL
In her book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir raised some fundamental issues surrounding the oppression of women. She argues the case that women are still at the immanence sphere where they are subjected and oppressed. At this level, women exist as a being for the “Other” and not for themselves. She alarms that this stage is detrimental to women and also to their freedom as well as the society at large. Furthermore, and most important to our discussion, is her belief that there is a great need to liberate women from this immanent, oppressive, and degrading sphere, to the liberating transcendence sphere-where she could exist as “self”. This paper, therefore, is a philosophical examination of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of mystification of women and its possible significance to our contemporary society. It shows that de Beauvoir’s cry for women’s liberation is still not wipe out in our contemporary world. It also identifies de Beauvoir’s philosophy with deep philosophical importance for the possibility of arriving at the liberation of women in our contemporary world.
Simone de Beauvoir as a Moral Philosopher
Conference Programm Simone De Beauvoir as a Moral philosopher, 2024
The philosophical value of Beauvoir’s work has in recent decades begun to attract wider recognition. Papers about her work are now published in major journals, and philosophers of very different backgrounds and methods do philosophy with and from her work. Many scholars convincingly argue that her ideas are useful for analyzing our contemporary world. Yet, to many scholars and to the general public, she is primarily seen as a feminist writer, a political philosopher, or a phenomenologist. Literary studies have successfully emphasized the moral dimension of her work, focusing largely on her novels. However, we are convinced that many aspects of Beauvoir’s moral philosophy need to be (re)discovered, e.g., in moral psychology, metaethics, normative ethics. For this conference, we invite philosophers as well as political theorists, sociologists, and literary scholars, historians, linguists, anthropologists, and so on, to contribute to a study of Beauvoir’s moral philosophy and ethical writing in general.
IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
In this paper, I focus on the term 'immanence' in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression. I argue that Beauvoir's use of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi-Strauss's reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies "woman" is constructed as "absolutely other." I show that there is an ambiguous logic of abjection at work in Beauvoir's account that explains why men are the only examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir.s jp_ 49..72
Gender as Justification in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe
Sapere Aude Revista De Filosofia, 2013
Work in contemporary feminist philosophy seems often to divide along a line between those who understand sexual difference to be originary and irreducible, and those who see "sexual difference" as an effect of patterns of social, political and material relations that have sedimented over time. I argue, along with other readers of Beauvoir, that this was a demarcation she refused, in favor of an affirmation of the ambiguity of sexual difference. My claim is that "femininity" and "masculinity" were, for Beauvoir, operations of justification that do their work in the very tension and ambiguity between nature and culture. Beauvoir's account of what we might, today, choose to call "gender" is an account of the distortion or reversal of the process of "conversion" by which adults take up and affirm an intersubjective condition of freedom and responsibility. In this paper I explore the notion of "justification" in Beauvoir's work as it is developed in relation to femininity, masculinity, sovereignty and plurality.