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3Beauvoir, Philosophy, and AutobiographyIn Laura Hengehold & Nancy Bauer (eds.), A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, Wiley. 2017.This chapter is a memoir of my efforts to solve the puzzle of Beauvoir's denials of her work in philosophy including: an account of my interviews with Beauvoir and my findings that The Second Sex influenced Sartre's later philosophy; Kate and Edward Fullbrook's discovery of clues in the posthumously published texts leading to their solution of the puzzle; and my work on the new puzzle of Beauvoir's misrepresentation in her Memoirs of her early work in philosophy and relationship with Sartre, inc…Read more
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16Is The Second Sex Beauvoir’s Application of Sartrean Existentialism?The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 20 68-74. 1998.Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as an application of Sartrean existentialism to the problem of women. Critics have claimed a Sartrean origin for Beauvoir's central theses: that under patriarchy woman is the Other, and that 'one is not born a woman, but becomes one.' An analysis of Beauvoir's recently discovered 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, challen…Read more
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2A Phenomenology of Oppression: A Critical Introduction to "le Deuxieme Sexe" by Simone de BeauvoirDissertation, Purdue University. 1977.
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100Beauvoir's Early Philosophy: 1926-27In Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Klaw, Margaret A. Simons & Marybeth Timmermann (eds.), Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27, University of Illinois Press. pp. 29-50. 2006.For philosophers familiar with the traditional interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir as a literary writer and philosophical follower of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s 1926-27 student diary is a revelation. Inviting an exploration of Beauvoir’s early philosophy foreclosed by the traditional interpretation, the student diary reveals Beauvoir’s early dedication to becoming a philosopher and her early formulation of philosophical problems and positions usually attributed to Sartre’s influence, such as …Read more
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18Philosophical Writings (edited book)University of Illinois Press. 2004.Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the first time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by essays fro…Read more
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8Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27 (edited book)University of Illinois Press. 2006.Simone de Beauvoir, still a teen, began a diary while a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. Written in 1926-27—before Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre—the diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and times and offer critical insights into her early intellectual interests, philosophy, and literary works. Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, h…Read more
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117Two Interviews with Simone de BeauvoirHypatia 3 (3). 1988.In these interviews from 1982 and 1985, I ask Beauvoir about her philosophical differences with Jean-Paul Sartre on the issues of voluntarism vs social conditioning and embodiment, individualism vs reciprocity, and ontology vs ethics. We also discuss her influence on Sartre's work, the problems with the current English translation of The Second Sex, her analyses of motherhood and feminist concepts of woman-identity, and her own experience of sexism.
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459Commentary. Beauvoir and Sartre: The Problem of the Other; corrected NotesIn Edward Fullbrook & Margaret A. Simons (eds.), An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy: Conversations Between Men and Women Philosophers, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 509-523. 2009.Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre struggled for the whole of their philosophical careers against one of modern Western philosophy's most pervasive concepts, the Cartesian notion of self. A notion of self is always a complex of ideas; in the case of Beauvoir and Sartre it includes the ideas of embodiment, temporality, the Other, and intersubjectivity. This essay will show the considerable part that gender, especially Beauvoir's position as a woman in twentieth-century France, played in the …Read more
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26Existentialism: A Beauvoirean LineageJournal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2): 261-267. 2012.The posthumously published diaries and letters of Beauvoir and Sartre challenge the traditional account of Beauvoir as Sartre's philosophical follower. They show Sartre drawing on Beauvoir's account of relations with the Other in her metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, as he began writing Being and Nothingness, and point to an unexplored Beauvoirean lineage of existentialism, including Bergson as well as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, and the African-American writer, Richard Wright…Read more
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1An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy: Conversations Between Men and Women Philosophers (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2009.This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosoph…Read more
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Thinking in Action Rethinking the Tradition and and the Turn to New BeginningsDepaul University. 2002.
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24IntroductionIn Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir & Anne Deing Cordero (eds.), Wartime Diary, University of Illinois Press. pp. 1-35. 2009.Simone de Beauvoir’s readers who saw a heterosexual ideal in her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre must have been dismayed by the 1990 French publication of her Journal de guerre (Wartime Diary) and Lettres à Sartre (Letters to Sartre). Discovered after Beauvoir’s death in 1986 and edited for publication by her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary and Letters to Sartre recount her sexual affairs with several young women. In Deirdre Bair’s authorized biography of…Read more
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34Political Writings (edited book)University of Illinois Press. 2012.New translations tracing decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement during the turbulent era of decolonization, from articles exposing conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard hitting attacks on right-wing intellectuals in the 1950s, to a 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article calling for the 'two state solution' in Israel. The texts range from a surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic 18th c. pornographer, the Marquis de Sa…Read more
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12A Question ofInfluenceIn Shannon M. Mussett & William S. Wilkerson (eds.), Beauvoir and Western Thought From Plato to Butler, State University of New York Press. pp. 153. 2012.
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23Philosophical Writings (edited book)University of Illinois Press. 2004.Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir.
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78Beauvoir and Bergson: A Question of InfluenceIn Shannon M. Mussett & William S. Wilkerson (eds.), Beauvoir and Western Thought From Plato to Butler, State University of New York Press. pp. 153-170. 2012.Simone de Beauvoir’s early enthusiasm for the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941)—denied in her 1958 autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter—is a surprising discovery in her 1927 handwritten student diary, as I reported in 1999 and explored at more length in 2003 (Simons 1999; Simons 2003). Discovered by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir after Beauvoir’s death in 1986 and now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale, Beauvoir’s student diary first appeared in print in the 2006 volume, Diary of a Ph…Read more
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32Bergson's Influence on Beauvoir's Philosophical MethodologyIn Claudia Card (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-128. 2003.The topic of this chapter, the early philosophical influence of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) on Simone de Beauvoir, may surprise those who remember Beauvoir’s reference to Bergson in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter where she denies Bergson’s importance. She writes there of her interests in 1926: “I preferred literature to philosophy, and I would not have been at all pleased if someone had prophesized that I would become a kind of Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whe…Read more
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35Book review: Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook. Simone de beauvoir: A critical introduction. New York: Polity press/blackwell, 1998 (review)Hypatia 14 (4): 183-186. 1999.
Edwardsville, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |