A French philosopher, novelist, and social critic whose 1949 study The Second Sex applied existentialist analysis to the situation of women and became a founding text of second wave feminist philosophy. Beauvoir's central claim, that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, argues that femininity is not a biological given but a role constructed by society and imposed on women as the Other against a male norm treated as the default of humanity. Her ethical writing, especially The Ethics of Ambiguity, worked out an existentialist ethics from Sartrean premises, arguing that human beings are radically free and must take responsibility for creating value in a world that supplies none ready made, while also insisting that genuine freedom requires acting so as to will the freedom of others as well as one's own. She was a longtime intellectual and personal partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, though her own philosophical contribution, long read as secondary to his, is now widely recognized by scholars as original and, on the ethics of freedom, in some respects prior to his.
Facts
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Associated With
The Second Sex's analysis of love as a lived, gendered structure, and de Beauvoir's critique of romantic self-abnegation, is a core modern text in the philosophy of love.
In Branch
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Traditions Founded
Why this is disputed. Existentialism has no single founder. Kierkegaard is widely read as its philosophical forerunner and Sartre coined the term's modern usage and gave the movement its systematic statement; Beauvoir, recorded here as the school's figure among this atlas' founding roster, was a central and independently original architect of its ethics, not its sole originator, and scholars differ on how the credit should be divided among the three.
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Simone de Beauvoir
WikipediaLead, opening sentenceQuote, Lead, opening sentence
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (9 January 1908-14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and InformationQuote
She also, however, refused to identify herself as a philosopher, referring to herself as an author in spite of her rigorous philosophical training and accomplishments.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Traditions Founded: Existentialism
The standard account for decades credited Sartre, with Heidegger and Kierkegaard behind him, as existentialism's real originator and cast Beauvoir chiefly as Sartre's interpreter and companion. Kate Kirkpatrick's 2019 biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life argues from Beauvoir's own student diaries and notebooks that she had independently developed core existentialist positions on freedom, ambiguity and ethical responsibility before her philosophical partnership with Sartre deepened, and that Sartre drew on her thinking as much as she drew on his. This atlas records the founding attribution to Beauvoir as debated for that reason: not because her contribution is now doubted, but because the older, Sartre-centered account it corrects is still the one most readers meet first.
A dissenting reading, from Kate Kirkpatrick and the reassessment of Beauvoir's originalityStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information
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