Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

One of the key French existentialists in the 50s, how does Simone de Beauvoir read today?

Kathryn Belle, Skye Cleary, Lauren Elkin and Kate Kirkpatrick join Shahidha Bari to discuss Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy and a newly discovered novel. How does she read now?

Kick-starting second-wave feminism with her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir was a key member of the Parisian circle of Existentialists alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Her philosophical influences include Descartes and Bergson, phenomenology via Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the assessment of society put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and ideas about idealism from Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel. 
Shahidha Bari and her guests consider her role in contemporary philosophy and Lauren Elkin describes translating a newly discovered novel The Inseparables.  

Kathryn Belle is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

Skye Cleary is Lecturer, Barnard College

Lauren Elkin is a Writer and translator of Simone de Beauvoir's The Inseparables, which follows two friends growing up and falling apart.

Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford

Recorded in partnership with LSE Forum for Philosophy.   You can find a playlist of Free Thinking discussions about philosophy on the programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx 
You can find a Radio 3 Sunday Feature hearing from some of our guests and archive of Simone de Beauvoir called Afterwords: Simone de Beauvoir https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011m4h 

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Image: Simone de Beauvoir
Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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