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(2016) Comparing Kant and Sartre, Dordrecht, Springer.
Foucault once wondered, "What philosopher has not tried to refute Plato", and then he proceeded to add his name to the list. Sartre might well have echoed that thought, substituting "Kant' for "Plato' in the process. Having passed what he recalled were some of the happiest years of his life at the École normale supérieure, rue d'Ulm (ENS), where he studied philosophy among the neo-Kantians at the Sorbonne, Sartre was clearly imbued with the Critical attitude, even if he spent the rest of his life trying to redefine or escape it. One could say of the Kantian aspect of Sartre's thought what John Locke said of the sense origin of our abstract ideas, that they bore "the tang of the cask they came in". Of course, Sartre's "cask" retained the flavours of Cartesian, Bergsonian, Husserlian, Hegelian, Marxian and many other philosophical elixirs that the bright normalien imbibed in the ensuing years, each with its proper trace. While my point is not to uncover an unprincipled eclectic — such was not the case — it serves to underscore the claim that Kant's thought provided an enduring component of Sartre's philosophical thought throughout his life.
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Full citation:
Flynn, T.R. (2016)., Kant and Sartre: psychology and metaphysics, in S. Baiasu (ed.), Comparing Kant and Sartre, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 62-76.
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