The Grapes Have Gone to Press

The Grape Press is now ready for your reading pleasure. The first, and probably the longest, essay that will appear on the site is titled “Ideas of Life, Liberty, and Authenticity: Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s Amorous Philosophical Dialogue.” It’s over six years old (it was my undergraduate thesis in 1997), so if you have any questions about it please be patient with my responses. Here’s the abstract:

In this paper, through a Gadamerian hermeneutical analysis of Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s letters while Sartre was away at war, as a written example of their amorous philosophical dialogue, and their later works as products of this dialogue, I show how they failed to achieve “authenticity” in their own relationship as they themselves defined it. Specifically, I address this failure precisely with regard to both the complete synthetic unity of consciousness and as absolute individual freedom, especially within their relationship of love. This failure of Sartrean existentialism to handle intimacy causes the entire system, supposedly formed from experience, to crumble.

If this happens to whet your appetite for the main event, the Introduction will soon follow. I’ll post here when it’s been added.

Update
The Introduction is now online.

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