Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Sartre : "In life man draws his own portrait..." (full quote below)

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Robert_S
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Re: Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Post by Robert_S » Thu Oct 06, 2011 9:24 am

Was it Sartre or Camus who said syphilis was clappy?

:dunno:
What I've found with a few discussions I've had lately is this self-satisfaction that people express with their proffessed open mindedness. In realty it ammounts to wilful ignorance and intellectual cowardice as they are choosing to not form any sort of opinion on a particular topic. Basically "I don't know and I'm not going to look at any evidence because I'm quite happy on this fence."
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Re: Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Post by Exi5tentialist » Thu Oct 06, 2011 6:50 pm

Robert_S wrote:Was it Sartre or Camus who said syphilis was clappy?

:dunno:
Neither, they were French: they would have said clappée.

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Re: Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Post by Jason » Sat Oct 08, 2011 1:20 am

Being and Time. :|

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Re: Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Post by apophenia » Sat Oct 08, 2011 5:00 am



I was a bit of a Sartre fan in high school, where I picked up Being and Nothingness. I moved on to other things but thought my professor for continental philosophy sneering down his nose at Sartre a bit extreme. I can grok why many don't like him -- he was a system builder in the tradition of the German Idealists, just starting from nothing and inventing a whole worldview out of whole cloth -- and this at a time when such grand syntheses were no longer in vogue. Still, I adore his phenomenological analysis, taking the blunt instrument of Husserl and reshaping it into a surgical scalpel. Sure, there was bollocks mixed in with the gold, but you're not supposed to swallow it whole!

Aside from Sartre, I never really got into the existentialists. I liked what little of Barthes I read, but was more interested at the time in the likes of Foucault and Derrida.

Still, you could surely do worse. (Ayn Rand, hint, hint.)

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Re: Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Post by Hermit » Sat Oct 08, 2011 10:26 am

apophenia wrote:you're not supposed to swallow it whole!
That's not what Sartre said.

I just dipped into Being and Nothingness for a few minutes to remind me why I never read much of it in the first place. The recollection was not slow in coming. By the time I got to the second musty, old bookmark in my musty, old copy (at this point: Introduction - The Pursuit of Being. VI. Being-In-Itself,) I remembered that Sartre makes Heidegger look a little less of a wanker than he actually is. Between them it's a close run thing, though, what with their common preoccupation with discussions from an ontic aspect. So I just look at the following quote, roll my eyes and find something more useful to read. The thread on counting in pictures would certainly qualify. "Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is."
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould

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Re: Jean-Paul Sartre on life

Post by Jason » Sat Oct 08, 2011 1:33 pm

Yes, but you must read them lest you have nothing to say at fancy parties!

Anyway, although he denied being an existentialist, Camus' L'Etranger is one of my favourite books.

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