Sartre: A Philosophical Biography

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was one of the twentieth century's most significant thinkers. He was a political critic, moralist, playwright, writer, and author of biographies and short stories, as well as the father of existentialist philosophy. The first book-length analysis of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, Thomas R. Flynn traces the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, weaving a narrative that is not simply philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary components of his work. This book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and ontology, by delving into Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology.