 First English edition cover | |
| Author | Iris Murdoch |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Studies in modern European literature and thought |
| Subject | Jean-Paul Sartre |
| Publisher | Bowes & Bowes |
Publication date | 1953 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 78 |
| OCLC | 647083074 |
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist is a book by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1953 by Bowes & Bowes of Cambridge, it was Murdoch's first book and the first book about Jean-Paul Sartre's work to be published in English.
In 1950 Iris Murdoch, then a tutor of philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford, contracted with the Cambridge publishing house Bowes & Bowes to write a short book on the French existentialists. It was to have focussed on the literary works of Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. [1] : 123 This project was not completed, but Murdoch developed the section on Sartre into the monograph Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, which appeared in November 1953 as part of Bowes & Bowes's "Studies in modern European literature and thought" series. It was the first book devoted to the work of Sartre to be published in English, [2] : 182 as well as being Murdoch's first published book. [3] : 1 [4] : 20
The book was first published in the United States by Yale University Press, also in 1953. It was reprinted in paperback in 1967 by Collins under the Fontana Library imprint. Spanish, Turkish and Japanese editions were published in 1956, 1964 and 1968 respectively. A revised edition with a new introduction by Murdoch was published by Chatto & Windus in London in 1987 and reprinted by Penguin Books in 1989. [5] : 94–97
Murdoch had met Sartre in Brussels in 1945 while she was working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and was impressed by his existentialist philosophy and by the fact that he was also a novelist and playwright. [6] : 216 In Sartre: Romantic Rationalist she took Sartre's novels as the starting point for examining his thought, which she characterized as influenced by "three post-Hegelian movements: the Marxist, the existentialist, and the phenomenological", while being "profoundly and self-consciously contemporary". [7] : 7 As well as Nausea and the trilogy of novels making up The Roads to Freedom , she drew on his philosophical works including Being and Nothingness and What Is Literature? . Among the themes she discussed were Sartre's views of freedom, interpersonal relations, and politics. She characterized him as "more at home as a playwright than a novelist", arguing that his "interest in issues rather than people, while it may sometimes be appropriate for a dramatist is not appropriate for a novelist". [7] : 110, 119
In her introduction to the new edition of Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, which appeared in 1987, Murdoch considered Sartre's writing since 1953, including the Critique of Dialectical Reason , Saint Genet , and The Family Idiot, his biography of Flaubert. [8]
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was well received and favourably reviewed. Books Abroad called it "an interesting book", particularly welcome for attempting "an objective evaluation" of Sartre, whose followers on American university campuses seemed to see him as "the high priest of a new cult". [9] Writing in The London Magazine , Maurice Cranston described it as "a model of intelligent exposition" in which Murdoch displayed "an uncommonly wide knowledge of continental authors as well as the sharp wits of an Oxford philosophy don". [10]
Stuart Hampshire, Murdoch's fellow Oxford philosophy don, reviewed the book for the New Statesman and Nation . He saw her "main purpose" as being "to explain what Sartre's existentialism is, and why it has been largely ignored here, particularly by English philosophers", a task in which "she almost wholly succeeds". [11]
Both Sissela Bok and Jay Parini reviewed the 1987 edition along with new biographies of Sartre. Bok noted that her "perspective, rooted, as was Sartre's, in philosophy and in literature" was necessary in order to understand Sartre's "role and his intellectual legacy". [8] Similarly, Parini concluded in The Hudson Review that Murdoch "has understood Sartre better than any other critic thus far". [12]
Tasked to write on him but having “not read a word of Sartre”, Mary Warnock, in her Memoir (2000), recalls "ruthlessly" putting the work to use and suggests that "this first of Iris’s books is both an extremely good book, and illuminating in a far more general way, throwing light not only on existentialist thinking but on Iris herself". [13]
Existentialism ( ) is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centers on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting. For example, in the view of an existentialist, the individual's starting point has been called "the existential angst", a sense of dread, disorientation, confusion, or anxiety in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Existentialist thinkers frequently explore issues related to the meaning, purpose, and value of human existence.
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, and even though she was not considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Existentialism Is a Humanism is a 1946 work by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture by the same name he gave at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29 October 1945. In early translations, Existentialism and Humanism was the title used in the United Kingdom; the work was originally published in the United States as Existentialism, and a later translation employs the original title.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.
Critique of Dialectical Reason is a 1960 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author further develops the existentialist Marxism he first expounded in his essay Search for a Method (1957). Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for a Method were written as a common manuscript, with Sartre intending the former to logically precede the latter. Critique of Dialectical Reason was Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943) having been the first. The book has been seen by some as an abandonment of Sartre's original existentialism, while others have seen it as a continuation and elaboration of his earlier work. It was translated into English by Alan Sheridan-Smith.
Being-in-itself is the self-contained and fully realized being of objects. It is a term used in early 20th century continental philosophy, especially in the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the existentialists.
Robert C. Solomon was a philosopher and business ethicist, notable author, and "Distinguished Teaching Professor of Business and Philosophy" at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held a named chair and taught for more than 30 years, authoring The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (1976) and more than 45 other books and editions. Critical of the narrow focus of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which he thought denied human nature and abdicated the important questions of life, he instead wrote analytically in response to the continental discourses of phenomenology and existentialism, on sex and love, on business ethics, and on other topics to which he brought an Aristotelian perspective on virtue ethics. He also wrote A Short History of Philosophy and others with his wife, Professor Kathleen Higgins.
Nausea is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel.
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. Existentialism is a philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual, that moral thinking and scientific thinking together are not sufficient for understanding all of human existence, and, therefore, that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to understand human existence. This philosophy analyzes relationships between the individual and things, or other human beings, and how they limit or condition choice.
Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, was an English philosopher of morality, education, and mind, and a writer on existentialism. She is best known for chairing an inquiry whose report formed the basis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. She served as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
Hazel Estella Barnes was an American philosopher, author, and translator. Best known for her popularization of existentialism in America, Barnes translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as writing original works on the subject. After earning her Ph.D. in Classics from Yale in 1941, she spent much of her career at the University of Colorado. In 1979, Barnes became the first woman to be named Distinguished Professor at CU-Boulder. In recognition of her long tenure and service to the University, in 1991 CU established the Hazel Barnes Prize for faculty who best embody "the enriching interrelationship between teaching and research." In 1962, Barnes was the host of a television series, "Self Encounter: A Study in Existentialism", which ran for 10 episodes and appeared on National Public Television.
Sissela Bok is a Swedish-born American philosopher and ethicist, the daughter of two Nobel Prize winners: Gunnar Myrdal who won the Economics prize with Friedrich Hayek in 1974, and Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982.
The proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence. To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. That identity or value must be created by the individual. By posing the acts that constitute them, they make their existence more significant.
Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy is a 1958 book by the philosopher William Barrett, in which the author explains the philosophical background of existentialism and provides a discussion of several major existentialist thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Irrational Man helped to introduce existentialism to the English-speaking world and has been identified as one of the most useful books that discuss the subject, but Barrett has also been criticized for endorsing irrationality and for giving a distorted and misleading account of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Atheistic existentialism is a kind of existentialism which strongly diverged from the Christian existential works of Søren Kierkegaard and developed within the context of an atheistic world view. The philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche provided existentialism's theoretical foundation in the 19th century, although their differing views on religion proved essential to the development of alternate types of existentialism. Atheistic existentialism was formally recognized after the 1943 publication of Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre later explicitly alluded to it in Existentialism is a Humanism in 1946.
Some observers believe existentialism forms a philosophical ground for anarchism. Anarchist historian Peter Marshall claims, "there is a close link between the existentialists' stress on the individual, free choice, and moral responsibility and the main tenets of anarchism".
Gary Cox is a British philosopher and biographer and the author of several books on Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism, general philosophy, ethics and philosophy of sport.
An Unofficial Rose is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1962, it was her sixth novel.
The Sovereignty of Good is a book of moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1970, it comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures. Murdoch argued against the prevailing consensus in moral philosophy, proposing instead a Platonist approach. The Sovereignty of Good is Murdoch's best known philosophy book.