Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism / Biography / Being in the World

November 29, 2016 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Review of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (New York: Other Press, 2016) One reason Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is such an engaging read was her decision to organize her examination of philosophy around the lives of the central thinkers, with tantalizing tidbits about their friendships and fallings out, their wives and lovers, their personal tensions over evolving and conflicting theories. But her approach […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Camus, Existentialism, France, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

Photo of third suicide bomber behind Stade de France blasts - photo released by French police, 22 Nov 2015 - AFP; Getty Images

Numantia, Cervantes, Vicksburg, Terrorists

June 2, 2016 by William Eaton

. . . though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us. — U.S. Grant, writing, years later, about the Confederate surrender at Appomattox[1] Ellos con duros estatutos fieros y con su extraña condición avara pusieron tan gran yugo a nuestros cuellos que forzados salimos […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Cervantes, civil war, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roman history, Spain, terrorism, theater, Vicksburg, war

Leave a comment

How does the good become good?

June 4, 2015 by William Eaton

Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these concoctions can do—lower high LDL cholesterol—the company engages its public relations and advertising arms in trumpeting the value of doing this thing. Lowering LDL cholesterol becomes something essential to prolonging human life. (And this in a time when, for example, obesity and poverty are much more life-threatening than LDL […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre, journalism, Marx, Thoreau

Leave a comment

Among Chicago’s Most Extraordinary Women

March 19, 2015 by William Eaton

This post juxtaposes brief notes with reproductions of five women-focused works at Chicago’s Art Institute. Readers are invited to make whatever connections they will and draw whatever conclusions they might between the art works, which seem to me unified only in their focus on women, in the genius of their making (by men, by the way), and by their co-existence in one Chicago institution. I would also note that these works are not unified even in their reproducibility. Three of these works are sculptures, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, Art Institute of Chicago, art museums, Balthus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Laura Mulvey, male gaze, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mirό, Roland Barthes, Willard Van Orman Quine, women

Leave a comment

Sartre’s Partridges

June 22, 2014 by William Eaton

{click for pdf} An e-mail discussion with the philosopher and Zeteo contributor Ed Mooney has led me back to two paragraphs in Sartre’s L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness). One of the oft-quoted (in English) lines from these paragraphs is “my acts cause values to spring up like partridges,” and I harbor hopes of someday grappling, in a short essay or two, with an extrapolation of this line. Very briefly here, this extrapolation would revisit the role of skepticism, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, morals, translation, values