Simone de Beauvoir

an existential-phenomenological ethics

Jeffner Allen

pp. 107-118

in: John Drummond, Lester Embree, Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstract

Thanks to the recent efforts of feminist scholars, Simone de Beauvoir's fame as the lifelong companion of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is slowly giving way to a recognition of the originality of her own work as a philosopher, autobiographer, novelist, essayist, editor, and political activist. Her ethics, in particular, has received a great deal of attention, not only because she offers the first formal articulation of an existential ethics in her 1947 book, Pour une morale de l'ambiguité (published in English in 1948 as The Ethics of Ambiguity and hereafter abbreviated as EA), but also because the moral challenges she discusses there and elsewhere in her works seem as appropriate today as they were half a century ago.

Cited authors

de Beauvoir Simone