Christos Kalpakidis

Jean-Paul Sartre is often read as a philosopher of freedom whose account of temporality merely radicalizes themes inherited from Heidegger’s analysis of ecstatic time. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that Sartre’s theory of temporality in Being and Nothingness plays a decisive and largely underappreciated role in grounding his ontological conception of freedom and realism. Far from offering a derivative phenomenology of lived time, Sartre develops a distinctive ontology of temporality that underwrites his commitment to indeterminacy, partial openness of reality and a non-dogmatic realism. The paper reconstructs Sartre’s account of time along three interconnected axes. First, it situates Sartre’s analysis of temporality within his broader project of a “phenomenological ontology,” emphasizing that temporality is not treated as a merely subjective form of experience, nor as an objective container of events. Instead, Sartre conceives temporality as an ontological structure that cuts across the distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself. This allows him to reject both static metaphysical conceptions of time and purely idealist accounts that reduce temporal becoming to consciousness alone. Second, the paper examines Sartre’s distinction between static and dynamic temporality. Static temporality corresponds to the serial, deterministic conception of time presupposed by classical metaphysics and certain strands of Cartesian thought. Dynamic temporality, by contrast, emerges in concrete temporal experience and is inseparable from the negativity of consciousness. Sartre’s analysis shows that the future is not merely unknown but ontologically underdetermined, while the past is neither annihilated nor fully present but persists as a factual dimension that constrains without determining action. This temporal structure enables Sartre to articulate freedom as neither arbitrary decisionism nor compatibilist adjustment to given conditions. Third, the paper argues that Sartre’s ontology of time commits him to a distinctive form of temporal realism best described as fragmentalist. Reality is temporally real but incomplete: not all facts are fixed at once, and the totality of what is cannot be given in advance. Sartre’s notion of original choice (choix fondamental) must be understood against this background. The original choice is not a timeless act but a temporally extended structure that unfolds within an open future and reconfigures the meaning of the past. By bringing Sartre into dialogue with analytic debates on the reality of time and temporal openness, the paper shows that Sartre offers a philosophically robust alternative to both temporal idealism and metaphysical realism about time. His account anticipates current discussions about temporal realism, fragmentalism while preserving the existential insight that freedom is inseparable from our temporal being-in-the-world. Sartre’s philosophy of time thus emerges as a central, rather than marginal, component of his ontology of freedom.

This paper reconstructs and evaluates Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical transformation of Kant’s concept of spontaneity. While Kant defines spontaneity as the rule-governed activity of synthesis that grounds the transcendental unity of apperception, Sartre detaches spontaneity from the synthetic and judgmental model in which Kant situates it. The paper argues that Sartre preserves Kant’s anti-empiricist insight that unity cannot arise from passive association, yet rejects the presupposition that experience consists of discrete representations requiring unification. Through an analysis of The Transcendence of the Ego and Sartre’s account of reflection, the paper shows that spontaneity is reconceived as the processual, temporal self-unfolding of consciousness rather than as an act attributable to a unifying ego. The transcendental ego thus appears not as the ground of unity but as a reflective construct allowing Sartre to transform the meaning of transcendental inquiry and open the possibility of a non-categorial mode of determination. The result is a reconfiguration of subjectivity in which unity belongs to the being of consciousness rather than to synthetic subsumption under judgment.

This paper examines the possibility of a theocratic political theology that neither reaffirms the Schmittian logic of sovereign transcendence nor dissolves the sacred into a purely immanent ontology of life. The guiding research question is how political theology might be retrieved as a critical rather than legitimating discourse—one capable of interrupting the sacralisation of political authority and exposing the contingent, biopolitical operations through which transcendence has been secularised into modern forms of governmentality. Methodologically, the paper combines a genealogical reconstruction of twentieth-century debates in political theology with a comparative phenomenological reading of key texts by Schmitt (Political Theology, 2005), Benjamin (Theologico-Political Fragment, 2007), and Bloch (Spirit of Utopia, 1986), alongside more recent biopolitical interventions by Agamben (1998, 2016), Esposito (2008, 2013), and Vatter (2020, 2021). The analysis follows the transformation of the katechon—the restraining force that withholds the eschaton—from its Schmittian function as a guardian of order to its critique in Benjamin’s idea of divine violence, which suspends both law and history. In dialogue with these thinkers, I develop the notion of theocratic political theology as a counter-discourse to sovereign transcendence: not the institutionalisation of divine power, but the invocation of an an-archic, non-sovereign authority that interrupts both theological teleology and secular immanence (Cacciari 2018; Taubes 2004, Paipais 2025). By situating this problematic within the horizon of biopolitics, I argue that the modern political theology of sovereignty has reappeared as a biopolitical dispositif that governs life under the guise of protection. Theocratic political theology, in contrast, seeks to re-signify the sacred—not as the transcendental legitimation of power, but as the immanent site of its exposure. This perspective reopens the space for an affirmative yet critical biopolitics that recognises the inseparability of life and politics while resisting their reduction to either juridical command or vitalist ontology (Esposito 2015; Vatter 2014). The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, it reinterprets the category of theocracy as a name for the constitutive negativity of the political—a zone where transcendence and immanence, the profane and the messianic, are held in productive tension rather than synthesis. Second, it offers a conceptual bridge between political theology and post-foundational political thought (Marchart 2007) by reading the sacred as a dimension of radical contingency rather than domination. In this sense, theocratic political theology articulates a profane messianism (Khatib 2013) that reveals the possibility of justice within history itself—where the interruption of sovereignty becomes the affirmation of another politics, grounded in vulnerability, finitude, and the ever-renewed demand for the political.

This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre ’ s early philosophy — above all Being and Nothingness — advances a distinctive and insuf fi ciently examined form of realism. Although Sartre rejects both classical metaphysical realism and idealism, his phenomenological ontology never- theless commits him to a realist position that speaks directly to contemporary debates associated with “ speculative ” or “ new ” realism. At the centre of this position lies what I reconstruct as Sartre ’ s “ argument from facticity, ” which exhibits a structural parallel with recent arguments for basic or absolute facts in contemporary realism debates. Sartre anticipates these approaches while avoiding their characteristic dogmatisms — most notably, their reliance on mathematical or naturalized absolutes. His realism is neutral in that it eschews privileging domain-speci fi c ontologies and instead treats facts as inherently tem- poral and indexical: they depend on temporal becoming and yet obtain universally across time. This conception is clari fi ed by Sartre ’ s appropriation of Husserl ’ s phenomenological metaphysics of facticity, through which he develops an image of reality as internally incomplete yet intelligible, and of transphenomenal facts as manifestable only through the temporalisation of subjectivity. I conclude by arguing that Sartre ’ s realism offers a compelling alternative to contemporary realist programs — such as those of Quentin Meillassoux, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Boghossian — by maintaining the independence of reality while acknowl- edging the partially constitutive role of fi nite subjects in its manifestation.

This paper reconstructs and defends Jean-Paul Sartre’s realism about consciousness as articulated in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, situating his position within contemporary debates on illusionism and anti-realism in the philosophy of mind. While Sartre’s descriptions of consciousness as “nothingness” and his emphasis on the contingency of the subject–world relation may appear to support an illusionist reading, the paper argues that Sartre offers a systematic rejection of the view that consciousness merely seems to exist. The analysis focuses on two interconnected argumentative strategies implicit in Sartre’s text. The first, described as an ontological argument, challenges the coherence of drawing a constitutive distinction between the appearance and reality of consciousness. The second, a regress argument, shows that attempts to replace consciousness with successively weaker “consciousness-like” states generate an infinite and explanatorily vicious regress. Together, these strategies aim to establish that consciousness cannot be globally non-veridical without undermining the very notion of illusion. The paper further argues that Sartre’s position does not rely on claims of infallible introspection or a reified metaphysics of qualia. Instead, it articulates a minimal, non-separatist realism according to which phenomenal consciousness is inseparable from intentionality. Read against contemporary illusionist theories, Sartre emerges as a philosopher who anticipates central worries about appearance–reality distinctions and higher-order models of consciousness.

This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s early philosophy—above all Being and Nothingness—advances a distinctive and insufficiently examined form of realism. Although Sartre rejects both classical metaphysical realism and idealism, his phenomenological ontology nevertheless commits him to a realist position that speaks directly to contemporary debates associated with “speculative” or “new” realism. At the centre of this position lies what I reconstruct as Sartre’s “argument from facticity,” which exhibits a structural parallel with recent arguments for basic or absolute facts. Sartre anticipates these approaches while avoiding their characteristic dogmatisms—most notably, their reliance on mathematical or naturalized absolutes. His realism is neutral in that it eschews privileging domain-specific ontologies and instead treats facts as inherently temporal and indexical: they depend on temporal becoming and yet obtain universally across time. This conception is clarified by Sartre’s appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics of facticity, and of transphenomenal facts as manifestable only through the temporalisation of subjectivity. I conclude by arguing that Sartre’s realism offers a compelling alternative to contemporary realist programs—such as those of Quentin Meillassoux, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Boghossian—by maintaining the independence of reality while acknowledging the partially constitutive role of finite subjects in its manifestation.

Der Beitrag untersucht, inwiefern Jean-Paul Sartres Phänomenologie einen eigenständigen und theoretisch tragfähigen Zugang zum Verständnis digitaler und virtueller Welten eröffnet. Ausgangspunkt ist die verbreitete Annahme, Sartre sei aufgrund seines radikalen Subjektivismus, seines cartesianischen Subjektmodells und seines vermeintlich geringen Interesses an Technik kein geeigneter Referenzautor für eine Philosophie der Digitalität. Der Artikel zeigt jedoch, dass Sartres Ontologie – insbesondere seine Begriffe der Imagination, Negation, Situation und Entwurf – zentrale phänomenale Strukturen digitaler Erfahrung präzise aufzuschließen vermag. Im ersten Schritt wird Sartres Theorie der Imagination als irrealisierende, negierende und zugleich welterschließende Leistung rekonstruiert. Diese Konzeption erlaubt es, digitale Objekte weder als bloße Illusionen noch als rein technische Artefakte zu deuten, sondern als intersubjektiv verifizierbare Entitäten mit einer eigenen Form von Weltlichkeit. Insbesondere im Anschluss an Yuk Hui und Philip Brey wird argumentiert, dass virtuelle Objekte eine genuine ontologische Stabilität aufweisen, die über traditionelle Vorstellungen des Imaginären hinausgeht. Im zweiten Schritt wird Sartres Begriff der Negativität eingesetzt, um die Wirkmacht immaterieller, jedoch realer Strukturen digitaler Umgebungen zu erklären. Negativität erweist sich als konstitutive Kraftfelder, die Wahrnehmung lenken, Handlungen motivieren und Situationen strukturieren. Dadurch entsteht ein ontologischer Rahmen, der digitale Phänomene weder naturalisiert noch in einen Zwei-Welten-Dualismus überführt. Schließlich wird der Ansatz mit phänomenologischen Strömungen der Game Studies verschränkt. Sartres Theorie des Projekts und der Freiheit bietet eine differenzierte Grundlage, um spielerische Subjektivität, digitale Verkörperung und die Situation des Spielers als existenziellen Entwurf zu verstehen. Es wird gezeigt, wie Sartres Begriff der Freiheit sich im digitalen Raum als relationale, widerständige und projektive Praxis manifestiert. Abschließend argumentiert der Beitrag – im Anschluss an Foucault–, dass virtuelle Umgebungen als „existenzielle Maschinen“ verstanden werden können: als Technologien, die neue Horizonte der Erfahrung und alternative Realisierbarkeit eröffnen. Virtualität erscheint damit nicht als Gegenwelt zur Realität, sondern als Ausdruck einer grundlegenden Dimension menschlicher Freiheit.

I argue that Sartre's conception of freedom is best understood when read in light of the Cartesian Meditations. Drawing on the often-neglected article on ‘Cartesian Freedom’, I demonstrate how Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, re-enacts the transition from the Third to Fourth Meditation – from the causal proof of God's existence to the problem of error and free will defence. Using a Cartesian-like distinction between objective and formal reality, Sartre argues for the ontological independence of the in-itself, committing to compatibilism about freedom. He addresses the Cartesian challenge of non-being and freedom as the ability to do otherwise, finally resolving the paradox of freedom by viewing situations as ambiguously shaped by absolute freedom and partial dependence on reality. Thus, my approach illuminates the historical and systematic depth of Sartre's middle ground between libertarianism and determinism.

This paper examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of death in light of his broader existential ontology, arguing that Sartre radically de-centers death from the philosophical analysis of human existence. Unlike Martin Heidegger, who famously positioned death at the core of Dasein’s being in Being and Time, Sartre insists that death is not constitutive of the human condition but rather a contingent, external event. In Sartre’s view, death does not shape the structure of the For-itself; it interrupts it from the outside, robbing it of its possibilities without participating in the formation of its freedom or selfhood. Thus, while Heidegger sees authentic being-towards-death as the horizon of existential freedom, Sartre maintains that freedom is ontologically prior and grounded in the nihilating structure of consciousness itself. Sartre’s critique of Heidegger is subtle and complex. He acknowledges the finite nature of human existence, but he locates this finitude not in mortality per se, but in the irreversibility of time and the burden of choice. Each choice made excludes others irrevocably, and this irreversible structuring of possibility defines the For-itself’s relation to the world. The finality of these choices—rather than the fact of death—is what confers gravity and meaning to existence. In this way, Sartre internalizes finitude within the projective temporality of freedom, rather than externalizing it in death as a boundary condition. This move has important philosophical implications. By refusing to grant death a constitutive status in the ontology of the subject, Sartre reveals an underlying affinity with the ancient Epicurean position, which holds that “death is nothing to us” because it is never experienced by the subject. Similarly, Sartre's approach aligns with Spinoza’s ethical vision, where human flourishing is rooted not in fear or anticipation of death but in the active affirmation of life and understanding. Both traditions reject the centrality of death in ethical life, and both propose a philosophy of immanence grounded in the lived reality of the present. In this light, Sartre’s existentialism may be reinterpreted as a modern expression of a neo-Epicurean orientation, one that seeks to liberate the subject not only from metaphysical illusions but also from the paralyzing weight of mortality. The paper thus pursues three interrelated goals: (1) to offer a critical reconstruction of Sartre’s position on death and temporality in contrast to Heidegger’s; (2) to explore the ontological centrality of freedom in Sartre’s thought and how it reconfigures the role of finitude; and (3) to situate Sartre within a broader philosophical lineage that includes Epicurus and Spinoza, arguing that his existential ethics is better understood as a philosophy of life rather than a philosophy of death. This reinterpretation challenges dominant readings of existentialism as morbid or despairing and instead highlights its emancipatory potential.

This article will revisit Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Charles Fourier to highlight an often-overlooked dimension of Benjamin’s thought and to illuminate a new understanding of Marxism. While scholarship has tended to privilege the “Angel of History” from the ninth Thesis of On the Concept of History, Benjamin’s equally striking reference to Fourier in the eleventh Thesis disrupts the binary between catastrophe and progress by introducing a third perspective: utopian anticipation. By re-centering this neglected reference, I will argue that Benjamin not only aligned himself with the tradition of utopian socialism but also reconfigured the relationship between Fourier and Marx, thereby opening new avenues for thinking Marxism beyond its “scientific” canonization. Fourier’s “hedonistic materialism,” with its affirmation of passions, pleasures, and a non-dominating relation to nature, exposed the repression of desire and the impoverishment of happiness under capitalist modernity. Benjamin recognized in Fourier not a naïve dreamer but a radical critic of ascetic morality and capitalist civilization. Importantly, Marx himself had praised Fourier’s “colossal conception of man,” and Benjamin brings this insight to the fore. He reads Fourier not as Marx’s prehistory but as his interlocutor, situating Marxism in a constellation that resists both bourgeois and orthodox-Marxist teleologies of progress. Thus, Benjamin’s thought moves between Marx and Fourier, opening a space for Marxism that incorporates utopian imagination and the critique of domination together. This perspective allows for a reorientation of Marxism itself. Against Engels’ construction of a developmental shift from “utopian” to “scientific” socialism, Benjamin’s engagement with Fourier suggests that Marxism must reclaim its utopian dimension if it is to remain a resource for emancipation. In Fourier’s anticipatory visions of transformed labor, liberated passions, and another nature, Benjamin finds not a diversion from material critique but its necessary complement. This constellation enriches Marxism by re-inscribing imagination, affect, and happiness at its core, elements often marginalized by technocratic or deterministic readings. Foregrounding Fourier within Benjamin’s philosophy of history therefore contributes to current debates on utopia, dystopia, and retrotopia. First, it reveals Benjamin’s insistence that utopia is indispensable to emancipation, as important as memory of the oppressed in breaking through the storm of progress. Second, it demonstrates that Marxism itself can be renewed when read through Fourier—not as the abandonment of critique, but as its expansion into anthropological, hedonistic, and imaginative dimensions. Third, it positions this reconfigured Marxism as a counter to both dystopian fatalism and retrotopian nostalgia, offering instead a model of struggle grounded in hope, desire, and joyful anticipation. To conclude, by re-examining Benjamin’s dialogue with Fourier, this article will illuminate Marx’s own openness to utopian thought and argue for a Marxism that refuses to choose between scientific critique and imagination. It will further show that Benjamin’s work contains not only a theory of catastrophe but also an anticipatory, passionate, and joyous dimension—a utopian resource for rethinking Marxism and reimagining futures in our own dark times.

This paper addresses the crisis of humanism in contemporary philosophical discourse, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence and digital technologies. Humanism is widely criticized for its speciesist assumptions, essentialist anthropology, and universalizing tendencies that ignore social antagonisms. In response, contemporary philosophy has seen a bifurcation: Anglo-American transhumanism roots human mindedness in mechanistic processes and envisions its transcendence via technology, while critical theory adopts animist or poststructuralist metaphysics that dissolve the human-nonhuman divide. Both trajectories, however, risk either reinforcing capitalism’s automation logic or relapsing into naïve digital humanism, which often ignores power dynamics and reproduces social biases. Drawing on Sartre’s later existentialist Marxism, the article develops a dialectical alternative that avoids both posthumanist conflation and essentialist dualism. This framework treats humans and technologies as co-constitutive within historical and social totalities, emphasizing praxis, antagonism, and the mediated character of machine intelligence. The aim is to rehabilitate a critical, non-essentialist humanism that remains responsive to the contradictions of AI-driven society.

In this paper I discuss aspects of Sartre’s philosophy in relation to contemporary approaches in analytic philosophy regarding self-consciousness and self-knowledge. In particular, I am interested in those approaches that take up certain considerations of Wittgenstein on transparency and immunity to error through misidentification in order to demystify our ability to make certain first-person claims without resorting to observation of ourselves. I will acknowledge the fruitfulness of such a dialogue between Sartre and Wittgenstein-inspired approaches but argue that it is restricted to the insight that the concept of self-consciousness is a genuine one which is not to be mistaken for self-reference. It will also be shown that these approaches miss important aspects of Sartre’s philosophy, both exegetically and systematically.

It is difficult to deny that Jean-Paul Sartre is influenced by the transcendental tradition. Although he employs forms of transcendental argumentation, he refrains from embracing transcendental idealism, which he equates with phenomenalism. He also critiques the necessity of the transcendental ego and challenges the primacy of epistemological questions over ontological ones. Providing a concrete characterization of Sartre’s phenomenological ontology is not without difficulties. Interpretations range from ontologically non-committal readings to more robust ones that interpret Sartre as a phenomenalist. Others continue to view the so-called dualism between the “for-itself” and the “in-itself” as a relapse into “transcendental realism.” In order to substantiate Sartre as a transcendental philosopher—and to avoid reading his project as merely descriptive—I will argue that Sartre’s transcendentalism follows from his attempt to ground freedom ontologically. In this respect, Sartre finds himself in good company with the classical German tradition. From the outset of his philosophical career, F. W. J. Schelling aspired to make freedom “the A and Ω of all philosophy,” and he consistently insisted on the primacy of ontology over any other philosophical discipline. From a Kantian perspective, this might be seen as a relapse into a pre-critical metaphysics that sidesteps the question of the justification of knowledge claims. Schelling has often been regarded as the first existentialist, yet there are few systematic attempts in the literature to understand his relationship to Sartre’s philosophy. In this paper, I aim to take a step toward closing this gap by examining Schelling’s middle-period work, the so-called Freiheitsschrift (Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom), which reveals striking parallels with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. A shared core insight between Sartre and Schelling is the conviction that any adequate treatment of the problem of freedom must also address the question of how consciousness and intentionality can be integrated into reality without sacrificing either the independence of reality or the existence of the mental realm.

This article argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of perception enables a form of infallibilism that remains compatible with human fallibility. Since Sartre conceives perception as a non-representational relation of presence to the real, perceptual episodes can—under favourable conditions—yield knowledge directly, without requiring knowledge-that-one-knows. For Sartre, knowledge is factive, yet fallibility arises not from its structure but from the situated and projective nature of the pour-soi. This offers a new angle on the epistemological debate between John McDowell and Charles Travis. Whereas McDowell defends a representational disjunctivism and Travis a non-representational naïve realism, Sartre provides a third option: perception presents the real itself, while the pour-soi determines which error possibilities are relevant in a given situation. Sartre thus yields a form of “situated infallibilism” that preserves factivity without collapsing into skepticism.

I argue that Sartre’s conception of freedom is best understood when read in light of the Cartesian Meditations. Drawing on the neglected article on Cartesian Freedom, I demonstrate how Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, reenacts the transition from the Third to Fourth Meditation—from the causal proof of God’s existence to the problem of error and free will defense. Using a Cartesian-like distinction between objective and formal reality, Sartre argues for the ontological independence of the In-itself, committing to compatibilism about freedom. He addresses the Cartesian challenge of non-being and freedom as the ability to do otherwise, finally resolving the paradox of freedom by viewing situations as ambiguously shaped by absolute freedom and partial dependence on reality. Thus, my approach illuminates the historical and systematic depth of Sartre’s middle ground between libertarianism and determinism.