Sartre Enjoying Reappraisal at Centennial

Yahoo - AP ^ | 6/21/05 | JAMEY KEATEN

[Bushbacker]

the trap is now closed. I have treated Sartre precisely as he treated Camus -

____How Sartre treated Camus or what Camus thought of Sartre was, as I said, a political quarrel between left-wingers...it is irrelevant to the issue of whether r not Sartre was a serious philosopher...and, indeed, to be hihonest, that question is really off-topic for FR.

Just because Sartre was a political whacko doesn't mean that his analysis of human consciousness is bogus. Many great thinkers have been political dunces...including, as I've noted, Martin Heidegger.

[Bushbacker]

Howard Dean can be viewed without political spin as well - except that neither he nor Sartre wanted to be seen outside of their politics.

___Howard Dean is a politician, Sartre was not.



As Sartre himself said, he was "preeminently a man of the Left."

__So was Camus and perhaps the majority of French intellectuals of that period.


unkless you prefer to totally discredit Heidegger because of his endorsement of Nazism

Heidegger should always be viewed with deep suspicion on this account - while he, unlike Sartre, was an extremely creative and original thinker,

___Your opinion, unproven in this discussion. I find both philosophers to be worthy.

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his collaboration with the Nazi regime was an intellectual commitment

____The fact that he could move intellectually from BEING AND TIME to Nazism doesn't make you pause?



and one which he reconciled with his philosophical viewpoint - he made Nazism, at least temporarily, part of his philosophical project just as Sartre permanently made Marxism a part of his.

--___Sartre's CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON...his Marxist
tome..came later in his career.



One cannot assess a thinker without assessing at least all the work he consciously decided to publish.

the case can also be made that Heidegger's celebrated Kehre was in part a reaction to his disastrous foray into politics.

___I don't reject Heidegger's work because he was a political boob, and I don't think you should do the same for Sartre's.

I abhor Sartre's pro-communist views...but I don't see any taint of hese views in BEING AND NOTHINGNESS or in some other essays or his plays and novels.