L.127.15120 Simone de Beauvoir: existentialist ethics and social oppression

Lehrende: Katja Cicigoj

Veranstaltungsart: Seminar

Orga-Einheit: Philosophie

Anzeige im Stundenplan:

Unterrichtssprache: Englisch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 40

Literatur:
The full literature list will be provided at the beginning of the seminar.

Kommentar:
This seminar will focus upon how Simone de Beauvoir carved an ethics and a theory of oppression from within a philosophical framework – existentialism – usually taken to be focused upon the experience of individual subjects and their inevitable freedom.
First, we will have a look at how Beauvoir developed an existentialist ethics of mutual recognition and ambiguity and consider in how far it remained a deontological (as opposed to utilitarian) moral theory. Second, we will see how her analysis of different forms of oppression made her push at the boundaries of existentialist thought and transform its key concepts into tools for a critical analysis of social relations. Third, we will explore the potential tensions and fruitful encounters in Beauvoir’s work between a philosophical ethics and a critical social analysis of oppression. Do ethical arguments turn critical social analysis into moralism and moralisation – or can they legitimately underpin critical assessments of social relations and arguments against oppression?

In this seminar, we will primarily address these issues through Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex, which presents a critical analysis of women’s situation in patriarchal societies, underpinned by her existentialist ethics. We will also relate this work to her earlier philosophical writings (The Ethics of Ambiguity, Phyrrus and Cineas) and other works where she analyses social oppression (race in America Day By Day, age in The Coming of Age, colonialism and class in some of her shorter essays).

The seminar will be held in English (also the provided literature will be in English).