Beauvoir and Philosophy of Education

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) had been almost totally excluded from the philosophical canon until the 1980s, when a revival and reinterpretation of her work by mainly feminist philosophers began. For example, she is not mentioned in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956) (nor is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though Albert Camus* is mentioned). In Paul Edwards’ comprehensive philosophical encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), the only mention is of her Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), which is said to be important in its own right but in relation to Jean Paul Sartre. Yet there is no further amplification or discussion in that source of what is said to be an important work and how it was related to Sartre – a crucial issue. In general her putative philosophical works are subsumed under or said to be derivative from those of Sartre, or they are recorded as “a kind of footnote to Sartre” (Kruks 1990, p. 84). In Christina Howells’ (1995) The Cambridge Companio ...