Immanence and Illusion in Sartre's Ontology of Consciousness

by Caleb Heldt

Overview

This book is a critical re-evaluation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological ontology, in which a theory of egological complicity and self-deception informing his later better known theory of bad faith is developed. This novel reinterpretation offers a systematic challenge to orthodox apprehensions of Sartre’s conceputualization of transcendental consciousness and the role that the ego plays within his account of pre-reflective consciousness. Heldt persuasively demonstrates how an adequate comprehension of Sartre’s theories of negation and reflection can reveal the world as it appears to human consciousness as one in which our reality is capable of becoming littered with illusions.

As the foundation upon which the rest of Sartre’s philosophical project is built, it is essential that the phenomenological ontology of Sartre’s early writings be interpreted with clarity. This book provides such a reinterpretation. In doing so, a philosophical inquiry emerges which is genuinely contemporary in its aim and scope and which seeks to demonstrate the significance of Sartre’s thought, not only as significant to the history of philosophy, but to ongoing debates in continental philosophy and philosophy of mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030495541
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	195
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Caleb Heldt is an independent scholar based in Colorado, USA. Earning his PhD in philosophy at the University of Warwick, he undertook research as an international scholar at the Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research interests lie in post-Kantian European philosophy as well as existential philosophy and phenomenology.

Table of Contents

1. Being, Nothingness, and Becoming.- 2. Pre-Reflective Consciousness and (Non-)Thetic Awareness.- 3. Transcendent (Non-)Thetic Awareness.- 4. Time-Consciousness: Physic and Transcendental.- 5. From Temporality to Wordly and Psychic Spatiality.- 6. From the Ontological to the Psychological: Memorial Totalization, Illusory Immanence and Transcendental Potentitality.