Free Republic

Now things were coming together. The Progressive worldview, and the Libertarian, Rand-worshipping worldview -- are all part of the same existentialist family tree containing Sartre and Alinsky. Rand's humanistic objectivism is as cold and Godless as Sartre's humanistic existentialism. These pseudo-intellectuals are the reason Christianity has been quietly erased line by line, year after year in the popular psyche. God was dead to Nietzsche, Sartre, and Ayn Rand. Even Sartre's famous cousin, Albert Schweitzer, denied the divinity of Christ.They were simply players in a full-court press for a total paradigm shift that has led us to the Mad Max dystopian...

He was one of the most brilliant minds. She was his lifelong companion who pioneered feminism. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were perhaps the most influential couple of the 20th century. Their legendary love pact - they never married but swore mutual devotion to each other with the freedom to have affairs - was an attempt to overthrow the stifling hypocrisy that, for so long, had dictated most people's lives. Always pushing new boundaries, they explored their thoughts in novels, plays and philosophical works. It earned Sartre the world's greatest literary accolade, the Nobel Prize. Yet he refused to...

"Catholic intellectual?" Is that a contradiction in terms? Of course not. It is silly to say so, even though progressives like to float the idea every once in a while when they are having a hard time pushing through one of their favored reforms. The 20th century was, after all, the century of Chesterton, Belloc, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox and Jacques Maritain.In fact, it would be easier to make the case that Catholic intellectuals sometimes spend too much time being intellectuals, too much time with scholarly explorations of the Faith, and not enough with the child-like imagery on their Christmas...

Despite the symposiums and commemorative events celebrating his life, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre appears to be fading as a French cultural icon. France celebrated the 100th anniversary of Sartre's birth Tuesday with a number of activities, including a National Library exhibit featuring letters, photos, interviews and manuscripts that belonged to the famed father of existentialism, who died in 1980. However, organizers say the exhibit, which runs until Aug. 21, has drawn a disappointing number of visitors. Sartre is often credited with bringing philosophy to street level and praised for his open criticism of the state, his rejection of the bourgeois society...

PARIS - Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th century philosopher whose influence has been on the wane, may be getting the last laugh from the grave as France battles a new existential crisis. The 100th anniversary of the bespectacled thinker's birth on Tuesday comes amid a bout of soul searching about France's role in the world following voters' resounding rejection of the European Union constitution and turmoil in the country's fabled social welfare system. With the word "crise" on just about everyone's lips, Sartre's legacy is being re-examined in a flurry of academic gatherings, media reports and commemorative exhibits marking the centennial,...

Hell is other people removing your cigaretteBy Henry Samuel in Paris (Filed: 10/03/2005)France's National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre's trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law. "Smoking," the Left-wing existentialist wrote, is "the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world."And yet in its poster for an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of Sartre's birth the Bibliothèque Nationale de France decided, destructively or not, to edit out the philosopher's Gauloise.The library's president, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, confirmed that the cigarette had been discreetly smudged to comply with the 1991 loi...

January 2005 Sartre vs. CamusAlgis Valiunas The greatest French writer of the 20th century was Marcel Proust, but in their day, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960) enjoyed an intellectual cachet that Proust in his own lifetime could only have dreamed of. Each was a novelist, a playwright, a philosopher, and a political intellectual, and in these various lines of work both were the acclaimed eminences of their time and place. For a while they were considered an item: the twin geniuses of existentialism, the French philosophical movement they pioneered and embodied. And indeed they were often together,...

It was a heady moment. Liberation was at hand. The world's most powerful totalitarian state had been defeated. World-historical struggles had come to an end. Such was the situation after the Soviet Union collapsed. And the sense of triumph was palpable. In an essay reprinted in "The Norman Podhoretz Reader" (Free Press), Mr. Podhoretz wrote a "Eulogy" for neo-conservatism — the political and cultural movement with which he and the magazine he edited, Commentary, had been so closely identified. It was a eulogy that proclaimed satisfaction and closure. For two decades, Commentary had advocated unrelenting challenges to Soviet power, and...

They are: Machiavelli, the inventor of "the new morality"; The most amazing thing about this brutal philosophy is that it won the modern mind, though only by watering down or covering up its darker aspects Kant, the subjectivizer of Truth; He gave impetus to the turn from the objective to the subjective, including the redefinition of truth itself as subjective. The consequences have been catastrophic. Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ; Nietzsche, the insane inventor of the "superman" was not only the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany, he is the favorite philosopher of hell. Freud, the founder of the sexual revolution; Freud...