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Edited by
Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer
This edition first published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Hengehold, Laura, editor. | Bauer, Nancy, 1960– editor.
Title: A companion to Simone de Beauvoir / edited by Laura Hengehold, Nancy Bauer.
Description: Hoboken: Wiley, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017011141 (print) | LCCN 2017019347 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118795972 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118795965 (epub) | ISBN 9781118796023 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908‐1986.
Classification: LCC B2430.B344 (ebook) | LCC B2430.B344 C655 2017 (print) | DDC 194–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011141
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos
Meryl Altman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University. She is working on a book, Beauvoir in Time.
A. Alexander Antonopoulos teaches courses in sexuality and feminism at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the Department of Philosophy, and Political Science Department at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec. His published work includes the co‐edited anthology High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity (State University of New York Press, 2003). He is currently working on a trans reading of The Second Sex, locating Beauvoir’s phenomenological tract within a history of modern science and the clinic.
Kristana Arp is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Long Island University, Brooklyn. Her book The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics was published in 2001 (Open Court). She is also the author of many scholarly essays on twentieth‐century French and German philosophy.
Eva D. Bahovec is Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches contemporary French philosophy and gender studies. She has edited the Slovene translation of Beauvoir’s Second Sex (Krtina, 2013). Her recent publications include “The Ego and the Other,” in The Klein‐Lacan Dialogues (London, Carnac Books, 2015), “Fatal Contingency: Althusser, Beauvoir, Rousseau,” published in the journal Problemi (2016). She is presently working on the book Foucault and Philosophy, to be published in 2018 in Ljubljana.
Nancy Bauer is Professor of Philosophy, Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and Dean of Academic Affairs for the Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences. She is interested in thinking about what philosophy is and what role it plays, or should or might play, in everyday human life. Her writing explores these issues, especially as they arise in reflection about gender and philosophy – and almost always with reference to Simone de Beauvoir. She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (Columbia University Press, 2001) and How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Debra Bergoffen is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at George Mason University and the Bishop Hamilton Philosopher in Residence at American University. Her writings include The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (State University of New York Press, 1997), Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body (Routledge, 2012), and the coedited anthology, Confronting Global Gender Justice: Human Rights, Women’s Lives (Routledge, 2011). Her essays dealing with sexual violence in armed conflict, human rights, Simone de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, and Lacan have appeared in numerous edited collections and journals. She is currently working on a book titled Antigone After Auschwitz.
Tanella Boni is a writer and professor of philosophy at Houphouët‐Boigny University, Cocody, Abidjan (Ivory Coast), currently teaching at Université de Paris 8 as a visiting professor. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. Her works focus on human rights, African literatures and arts, feminist issues, and the relation between ethics and politics. She has authored several collections of poetry, essays, and novels, including Matins de couvre‐feu (Editions du Rocher, 2005); Les nègres n’iront jamais au paradis (Serpent à plumes, 2006); La diversité du monde. Réflexions sur l’écriture et les questions de notre temps (Editions L'Harmattan, 2010); Que vivent les femmes d’Afrique? (Éditions du Panama, 2008); L’avenir a rendez‐vous avec l’aube (Vents d'ailleurs, 2011); Toute d’étincelles vêtue (Vents d'ailleurs, 2014), and she is a contributor to the Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene Khader, and Alison Stone (2017).
Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of nine books, including the award‐winning Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge, 2000) and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004). Intersectionality, her most recent book co‐authored with Sirma Bilge, was published in 2016 as part of Polity Press’s Key Concepts series.
Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy and Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University (Canada). She is the author of Jean‐Paul Sartre (Routledge, 2009) and co‐edited with Jacob Golomb the volume Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence (Indiana University Press 2009). Her first book was a comparative study of Nietzsche and Sartre. She has published books and articles on Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Sartre.
Penelope Deutscher is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She the author of a number of works in the area of twentieth‐century French philosophy and gender and sexuality studies, including The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Zeynep Direk received her PhD from the University of Memphis in 1998. She is professor in the Department of Philosophy at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She publishes on contemporary French philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, feminism, and the history of Turkish philosophy. Her research on feminism focuses on feminist thinkers’ interpretations of the fundamental problems and concepts of Western philosophy. Zeynep Direk edited the Blackwell Companion to Derrida, and is the author of three books in Turkish, Başkalık Deneyimi [The Experience of Alterity] (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2005), Derrida’nın Siyaset Felsefesi, Derrida's Political Philosophy (forthcoming, İstanbul: Metis, 2017) and Feminism and Philosophy (forthcoming, İstanbul: Metis, 2017).
Ingrid Galster (1944–2015) was Professor of Romance Literatures at the University of Padeborn, Germany. In addition to work on Latin American literature and film, she was author/editor of numerous books on Jean‐Paul Sartre, particularly his dramatic works, and four books on Beauvoir, including the collection Simone de Beauvoir: Le Deuxième Sexe. Le livre fondateur du féminisme moderne en situation (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), which explored the state of the intellectual disciplines referenced by Beauvoir in 1949 and resulted in a revised version of Gallimard’s text. A ground‐breaking intellectual historian, Galster also undertook significant primary research into Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s activities during the Occupation. Her last book was Simone de Beauvoir und der Feminismus (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2015).
Kathryn T. Gines's primary research and teaching interests lie in continental philosophy (especially Existentialism and Phenomenology), Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, and Critical Philosophy of Race. She has published articles on race, assimilation, feminism, intersectionality, and sex and sexuality in contemporary hip‐hop. Gines is author of Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014) and has co‐edited an anthology titled Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2010). She is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP), the director of Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP), co‐founder (with Shirley Moody Turner) of the Anna Julia Cooper Society, and a founding co‐editor of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR).
Ruth Groenhout is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her publications focus on a range of issues in bioethics and an ethics of care, and include Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith (Indiana University Press, 2003). She has written a variety of journal articles on issues such as the ethics of public health research, embodiment and the nurse–client encounter, virtue theory and feminism, and the international brain drain problem in medicine.
Emily R. Grosholz is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy at Penn State, and member of SPHERE, University of Paris Diderot/Paris 7. Her book of poetry, Childhood (Accents Publishing, 2014), translated into Japanese by Atsuko Hayakawa and Italian by Sara Amadori, has raised over $2250 for UNICEF. Starry Reckoning: Reference and Analysis in Mathematics and Cosmology, and Great Circles: The Transits of Mathematics and Poetry, are due out from Springer in 2017 and 2018.
Laura Hengehold is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA. She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Individuation (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and The Body Problematic: Foucault and Kant on Political Imagination (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Her current project is Anonymity and Recognition: Simone de Beauvoir and Feminist Politics (forthcoming). She has published numerous articles on political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of sexuality using perspectives from Continental European and African thinkers.
Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She has published widely in the fields of international political theory, ethics and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Routledge, 2003) and co‐editor, with Tuija Pulkkinen, of Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Michel Kail is Professeur agrégé of Philosophy (Paris) and, from 1986 to 2007, was a member of the editorial board of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s own journal, Les temps modernes. He is the editor of the journal L’Homme et la Société, revue internationale de recherche et de synthèse en sciences sociales, and author of many books and papers about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, political philosophy and criticism of economics. His most recent book Jean‐Paul Sartre, Qu’est‐ce que la subjectivité?, edited by Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayr, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson (Paris, Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2013), was published in English by Verso in 2016.
Sonia Kruks is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, where she teaches political theory and philosophy. Her main research interests lie at the intersections of existential phenomenology with feminist and other political theory. She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Cornell University Press, 2001), as well as other books and numerous papers.
Kyoo Lee, who teaches philosophy and related courses at The City University of New York, is a theorist and writer working widely in the intersecting fields of the arts and the humanities. She is the author of Writing Entanglish (Belladonna Chapbook, 2015) and Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (Fordham University Press, 2012), and also has co‐edited journal issues on “Safe” (Women’s Studies Quarterly, 2011), and “Xenophobia & Racism” (Critical Philosophy of Race, 2014). A recipient of faculty fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and Korea Institute for Advanced Study, she also occasionally summer‐teaches at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, seminaring on philopoetics. Currently, she serves as an Associate Editor of Derrida Today and Hypatia, and is also on the editorial boards of Open Humanities Press and WSQ – The Feminist Press. A member of Poetry Translation Center, UK, she also serves on the PEN America Translation Committee.
Anne van Leeuwen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at James Madison University. She teaches courses in twentieth‐century continental philosophy, and she is interested in the reception of Marxism and phenomenology in French philosophy, as well as intersections among psychoanalysis, critical theory, and structuralism. She has published articles on Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray and is co‐editing a volume on Beauvoir and Irigaray (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Mary Beth Mader is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Her research specializations are in Recent and Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Feminist Philosophy. She is the author of Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development (State University of New York Press, 2011), and articles on Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. She translated Luce Irigaray's The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, and contributed editorial translation work to Margaret A. Simons’ Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings (University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Lori J. Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies and Professor of Political Science at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Her latest book is Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke University Press, 2017). She is author of (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's and Germaine de Staël's Subversive Women (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity (Routledge, 2006); co‐editor of Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking (University of Illinois Press, 2006, with Patricia Moynagh), W Stands for Women (Duke University Press, 2007, with Michael Ferguson), Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford University Press, 2016, with Bonnie Honig); and editor of Fifty‐One Key Feminist Thinkers (Routledge, 2016).
William McBride is Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University and the Immediate Past President of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP). He was co‐founder of the North American Sartre Society. He has authored, edited, and co‐edited 19 books – among them The Philosophy of Marx (Hutchinson, 1977; reprinted Routledge, 2015), Sartre’s Political Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), Philosophical Reflections on the Changes in Eastern Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), and From Yugoslav Praxis to Global Pathos (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), and published over 250 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews.
Jennifer McWeeny is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is co‐editor with Ashby Butnor of Asian and Feminist Philosophies in Dialogue: Liberating Traditions (Columbia University Press, 2014) and her articles have appeared in Continental Philosophy Review, Hypatia, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, Chiasmi International, and Journal for Critical Animal Studies, among other venues. McWeeny’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of feminist philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, ontology, decolonial theory, and Asian and comparative philosophies. She has served as Executive Secretary for the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy and as the Director of the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the International Merleau‐Ponty Circle. She was recently named Editor‐in‐Chief of Simone de Beauvoir Studies.
Shannon M. Mussett is Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. She specializes in existentialism, German Idealism and feminist theory. She is co‐editor of Beauvoir and the History of Philosophy from Plato to Butler (State University of New York Press, 2012) and co‐editor of The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Les Mandarins’ (State University of New York Press, 2006). She publishes widely on Beauvoir and Hegel and is currently working on a manuscript detailing the philosophy of entropy.
Emily Anne Parker is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Towson University. Her work has appeared in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy Today, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Trans‐Humanities and philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. She is editor of a special issue entitled “Luce Irigaray: From Ecology to Elemental Difference” of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology and co‐editor of a volume forthcoming with Oxford University Press re‐reading the relationship between the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray.
Tove Pettersen is Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway and currently the president of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society. She specializes in moral philosophy and ethics, especially in the ethics of care and the existential ethics of Simone de Beauvoir. Her publications include Simone de Beauvoir – A Humanist Thinker (Rodopi, 2015), “Conceptions of Care: Altruism, Feminism, and Mature Care” (Hypatia, 2012), “The Ethics of Care: Normative Structures and Empirical Implications” (Health Care Analysis, 2011), “Acting for Others: Moral Ontology in Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’” (2010), Comprehending Care. Problems and Possibilities in The Ethics of Care (Lexington, 2008) and “Freedom and Feminism in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy” (2008). Pettersen has written the introduction to the Norwegian translation of Pyrrhus and Cineas and The Ethics of Ambiguity (2009), and her articles have been translated into French and Italian.
Sandra Reineke is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Idaho (USA), where she also directs the University Honors Program. Her research focuses on citizenship rights and biopolitics in international perspective. Her book, entitled Beauvoir and Her Sisters: The Politics of Women’s Bodies in France, was published in 2011 by the University of Illinois Press. Other recent articles appeared in Simone de Beauvoir Studies, The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Contemporary French Civilization.
Stella Sandford is Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, UK. She is the author of Plato and Sex (Polity, 2010), How to Read Beauvoir (Granta/Norton, 2006) and The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (Athlone/Continuum, 2000). She is co‐editor (with Mandy Merck) of Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and (with Peter Osborne) Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (Continuum, 2002), as well as essays on Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Kant, Critical Philosophy of Race, and feminist philosophy and theory.
Sara Cohen Shabot is Assistant Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program, University of Haifa, and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Haifa, Israel. She has specialized in phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and philosophies of the body. Her dissertation (published in Hebrew) dealt with the concept of the grotesque and the grotesque body in relation to Merleau‐Ponty's philosophy. Her current research and publications address phenomenological perspectives (mainly Beauvoirian) on the maternal embodied subject.
Diane Perpich is Director of Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Programs and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. She is the author of The Ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford University Press, 2008) and has published essays on phenomenology, French feminism, and contemporary issues in ethics. She is currently at work on a project assessing the contributions of the phenomenological‐existential tradition to debates in social ontology.
Sally J. Scholz is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. She is the author of On de Beauvoir (Wadsworth Publishing Inc., 2000), On Rousseau (Wadsworth Publishing Inc., 2001), Political Solidarity (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), and Feminism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2010). Scholz has published articles on violence against women, oppression, and just war theory among other topics. She is a former editor of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy and is currently Editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.
Margaret A. Simons, Distinguished Research Professor Emerita, Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is author of Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, 1999); a founding editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy; and editor/co‐editor of several volumes of critical articles on Beauvoir’s philosophy, as well as six volumes of texts by Beauvoir in English translation as part of the Beauvoir Series (co‐edited with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir; University of Illinois Press), including most recently, Feminist Writings (2015).
Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. Her books are Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2006), An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity Press, 2007), and Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011). She has also edited The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy Volume 5: The Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Shannon Sullivan is Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology at UNC Charlotte. She is author or editor of eight books, including most recently Good White People: The Problem with Middle‐Class White Anti‐Racism (State University of New York Press, 2014) and The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Ursula Tidd is Professor of Modern French Literature and Thought at the University of Manchester. She is the author of four monographs: Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Simone de Beauvoir (Routledge “Critical Thinkers” series, 2004) and Simone de Beauvoir (Reaktion Books, “Critical Lives” series, 2009), Jorge Semprún: Writing the European Other (Legenda, 2014), as well as essays on Beauvoir’s life writing, fiction and philosophy.
Karen Vintges is Assistant Professor and university lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She has published Philosophy as Passion. The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996 [originally in Dutch, 1992]); Feminism and the Final Foucault, with D. Taylor (Illinois University Press, 2004), Women, Feminism and Fundamentalism, with I. Dubel (SWP Publishing Company, 2007) and several other books in Dutch. She coordinated the NWO research project “Women and Islam: New Perspectives” (2008–2013). A recent book publication titled A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) synthesizes this research project, and evaluates the relevance of Beauvoir’s legacy in world perspective.
William Wilkerson is Dean of the Honors College at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He received his B.A. in Humanities from Willamette University, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Purdue University. He has published many articles on twentieth‐century European philosophy and GLBTQ philosophy. He co‐edited, with Jeffrey Paris, New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); authored a book on sexual identity entitled Ambiguity and Sexuality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and co‐edited (with Shannon Mussett) a collection of essays on the work of Simone de Beauvoir called Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler (State University of New York Press, 2012). He also has research and teaching interests in political philosophy, Marxism, feminist philosophy, and gender studies. When he is not thinking about these things, he enjoys gardening, woodwork, cooking, and reading books that have plots.
Emily Zakin is Professor of Philosophy at Miami University. She conducts research and teaches courses in political philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and nineteenth‐and twentieth‐century continental philosophy. Her current research focuses on the limits and possibilities of political community. She is the co‐editor of Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (Routledge, 1997), and Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis (State University of New York Press, 2009). She was also a founding co‐editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. She has published numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Telos.
First and foremost, I want to extend my thanks to Nancy Bauer, with whom this project was first conceived, and without whom it would not have been possible. Her vision and guidance have been crucial to its completion. I would also like to acknowledge the patience and encouragement of our first editor at Wiley Blackwell, Liam Cooper, who really wanted this volume to see the light of day.
Many other editors at Wiley Blackwell, including Marissa Koors, Roshna Mohan, Manish Luthra, and Sakthivel Kandaswamy, deserve recognition for their later support of the huge task we had set ourselves. I owe a particularly concrete debt to Megan Weber and to our copy editor, Doreen Kruger, who helped me wrestle the manuscript into shape and patiently polish it. Their expertise, attention to detail, and dedication to getting things done the right way were essential, and exemplary. I also want to thank the Baker‐Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University for financial support to assist me during the final phase of editing, and Maggie Kaminski, its administrative director, who provided sage tactical advice more than a few times. I should also mention my debt to Cheryl Toman, whose wide‐ranging expertise in francophone studies and ongoing conversation regarding the art of translation are indispensible to me. And I would be lost without Renee Holland‐Golphin’s moral support and adroit management of my schedule.
Kyoo Lee, Sonia Kruks, Peg Simons, and Bill McBride generously lent their expertise to our efforts. Karen Thornton and Mark Eddy, the philosophy librarians at Case Western Reserve University, deserve special thanks for having, along with Emily Grosholz and Peg Simons, helped me sort through the thicket of available editions of Beauvoir’s major texts referenced in these chapters. I am also grateful to Presses Universitaires de Sorbonne for permission to include Chapter 3 as a tribute to the late Ingrid Galster, an eminent intellectual historian, critic, and defender of Beauvoir whose work should be better known in English.
Finally, I wish to express my deepest thanks to the contributors for the opportunity to read, discuss, and publish their work. It has truly been an enjoyable process getting to know, in however cursory a fashion, such talented and knowledgeable scholars in so many different countries, and to learn about their different approaches not only to Beauvoir but to the philosophical traditions at whose crossroads she stands.