A Moral Philosopher in Occupied France: Simone de Beauvoir on Justification and the Other

Michelle Kosch (Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University)

In the period from 1941 to 1946, Simone de Beauvoir wrote two novels, two nonfiction books and four essays on the topic of ‘the individual situation, its moral significance, and its relation to the social’. These works form the (generally neglected) background to The Second Sex (1949). They were profoundly influenced by the context in which they were written: Paris during the occupation, the liberation, and the immediate postwar period. This talk sketches the outlines of the moral theory Beauvoir developed in these works.