Sartre existentialism is a humanism analysis of one

Your complimentary articles. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please. One explanation for this may be that Sartre himself came to regret the publication of the book and later repudiated parts of it. My aim in this article is to give a straightforward introduction to the main themes of Existentialism and Humanism , pointing to its most obvious strengths and shortcomings.

Existentialism and Humanism was first presented as a public lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris in October This was a time of great intellectual ferment and guarded optimism: Paris had been liberated from the Nazi Occupation and reprisals against collaborators were being meted out. There was a sense of the need for a reexamination of the previously unquestioned foundations of society and morality.

Sartre existentialism is a humanism summary

People who would otherwise have led relatively uneventful lives had been forced to think about issues of integrity and betrayal in relation to the Occupation, the Resistance and the Vichy Government. The truth about the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau was emerging; the atom bomb had been dropped for the first time — evidence of the human capacity for evil and destruction was everywhere.

Philosophical, and in particular moral, questions were no longer of merely academic interest.