Philosophy Talk - Jean-Paul Sartre

The nice folks at Philosophy Talk have just put out an episode on the highly influential French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Like his compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who began his highly influential The Social Contract with the now famous line "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," Sartre is probably most famous for his thoughts on freedom: specifically for his thoughts and defense of existentialist radical freedom.

While his early phenomenological analysis and defense of freedom tended to focus primarily on the authenticity of individual consciousness, Sartre's later thoughts became more complex (and some might even say inconsistent) as he began to understand and incorporate the insights of historical materialism into his philosophical and political narrative, and there's an interesting discussion of that, as well as many other fascinating themes, in the episode below: