Introduction: Beauvoir and the ambiguity of “ambiguity” in ethics

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Card, Claudia
Copyright Year	2003
Abstract	During the 1950s, an era when feminism was at a particularly low ebb, American college students encountered translations of Simone de Beauvoir’sThe Second Sex andThe Ethics ofAmbiguity in courses on French existentialism.1 The popularity of these courses was due in no small part to the French existentialists’ addition of sexuality to the philosophical agenda. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was the centerpiece, and Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity was introduced to show how, contrary to Sartre’s early view, existentialism might indeed provide a ground for ethics. The Second Sex, however, was presented as though it simply applied Sartre’s philosophy to women’s situations, a view later to be challenged by feminist scholarship, as many chapters in this Companion show in detail. Yet readers were astonished even then by perspectives The Second Sex offered on female sexuality. Raising ethical and political issues, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex nicely complemented Alfred Kinsey’s “scandalous” but coldly scientific report on sexual behavior in the human female, which appeared in the same year as the paperback edition of the English translation of Beauvoir’s treatise on women.2 Beauvoir’s most widely read philosophical works are still The Second Sex andThe Ethics ofAmbiguity. But her laterwork aswell is philosophically deep and often original. It offers mature perspectives on such topics as torture and old age in addition to new perspectives on her earlierwork. Beauvoir’s total output (still being translated into English) is prodigious. The chronology and bibliography in this Companion show how highly varied in form her published writings are,
Starting Page	1
Ending Page	23
Page Count	23
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1017/ccol0521790964.001
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://the-eye.eu/public/WorldTracker.org/Sociology/Philosophy%20-%20The%20Cambridge%20Companion%20Series/The%20Cambridge%20Companion%20to%20Simone%20De%20Beauvoir.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1017/ccol0521790964.001
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article