Existentialism
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartr, was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy and has been called "the most written about twentieth-century author."
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris. When Sartre was 15 months old, his father died of a fever. His mother Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.
Sartre soon became cross-eyed.
As a teenager in the 1920s, Jean became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education which was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger among others. In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted thinker, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions.
Together, Sartre and M. Welle challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually-destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture. In this work, he defends existentialism against its detractors, which ultimately results in a somewhat incomplete description of his ideas. The work has been considered a popular, if over-simplifying, point of entry for those seeking to learn more about Sartre's ideas but lacking the background in philosophy necessary to fully absorb his longer work Being and Nothingness. One should not take the expression of his ideas contained here as authoritative. In 1965, Sartre told Mitchelle Welle that its publication had been "an error.
VIA Wikipedia