In other words, you are confused enough to think that anyone who writes novels cannot also do philosophy.
___Of course. Sartre wrote NAUSEA AND NO EXIT. But Camus never wrote an extended work of philosophy that begins with fundamental premises and builds a system.
What is the difference between an essayist and a philosopher? Are not many philosophical treatises, and some of the best at that, essays?
Do Hume's Essays Moral and Political make him just an essayist and not a philosopher?
I assume Kierkegaard and Plato, who deigned to couch philosophical discourse in fictional settings are therefore not philosophers either, but novelists?
_____I think Camus was a man of literature who had a philosophical bent, but not a philosopher.
And I expect that you consider John Locke's monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to have no philosophical value?
__As an essay, yes.
Is Sartre now disqualified from being considered a hack philosopher because he was also a hack playwright and a hack Marxist essayist?
____I part company with his Marxist phase, but BEING AND NOTHINGNESS is a profound and basically apolitical work.
The fact is, Camus is universally acknowledged as a philosopher and his ideas - especially as encapsulated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe - were far more fresh in his day and far more relevant in our own than anything Sartre ever scribbled.
____I like Camus. THE REBEL was impressive, particularly. But Camus was not writing in the Continental philosophical tradition that Sartre was extending.
One measure of Camus' true stature was his decision to break from the lemminglike adoration of Marxism that Sartre and his other mediocre contemporaries practiced.
_____I don't admire Sartre's politics, only his intellect.
Most tellingly, Sartre published L'Etre et le Neant the year after Camus published Mythe and much of the criticism of L'Etre in the press at the time mentioned its failure to address the aporia of free will and determinism in the existentialist project - a problem Mythe had already raised the year before.
___THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS was not a work of comprehensive philosophy.
Neither did Nietzsche. Nor did Plato. Nor did Leibniz. Nor did the mature Wittgenstein.
Are they disqualified from being philosophers as well?
As an essay, yes.
What do you mean by this statement? That Locke's Essay was not philosophy because it is an essay? Really?
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS is a profound and basically apolitical work
While L'Etre never specifically mentions politics, it was written to provide a new philosophical underpinning for Marxism in the wake of Hegelianism's demise.
And while you continually claim profundity for L'Etre you offer no examples.
But Camus was not writing in the Continental philosophical tradition that Sartre was extending.
?!?
Perhaps because Camus was explicitly questioning the continuing usefulness of that tradition?
I don't admire Sartre's politics, only his intellect.
His meagre intellect was swamped in politics - they are not separable, unless one believes that politics has nothing to do with thought. No modern philosopher has attached himself as slavishly to a political party as Sartre did to the PCF.
Even the Nazi-sympathizer Heidegger tried to reinterpret Nazi ideology to fit his philosophy, not the other way around.
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS was not a work of comprehensive philosophy.
Again, who cares?
Neither was Zur Genealogy der Moral (Genealogy of Morals), neither was Phaidros (Phaedrus), neither were the Blue and Brown Books.
The criterion of philosophical achievement is not a neat, systematic treatise - it is the introduction of bold new analyses of existence.
I can't believe you honestly think that one cannot be a philosopher unless one conforms to the Kantian model of highly structured treatises.
And you have the nerve to call me a Philistine.