Simone de Beauvoir: The 'Second Sex' and modern-day influence

When Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) published The Second Sex in 1949 it was both a scandal and a sensation, quickly becoming a best-seller and catapulting Beauvoir to international fame. Now translated into over 40 languages, the book remains the single most important text in the history of the women’s movement and in Western feminist theory. But how is Beauvoir’s work relevant today?

In this talk Professor Stella Sandford will guide us through the fascinating philosophical background to The Second Sex and many of Beauvoir’s other works. Together we will explore and demystify the philosophy of existentialism and its twin, phenomenology. We will explore fundamental questions such as what it means to be a human being and about the nature of freedom and its limits. We will also question the ways in which society and culture shape how we think and feel but also how we act and move. We will explore what Beauvoir meant when she said that she saw the world ‘through philosophical eyes’ and learn how to see that way ourselves so that philosophy is not something outside of everyday life but a way of understanding and enriching it.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7.30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Stella Sandford is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. Her research specialisms include philosophies of sex and gender, critical philosophy of race, philosophy and psychoanalytical theory and feminist philosophy and theory. Her books include Plato and Sex (Polity, 2010), How to Read Beauvoir (Granta, 2006) and Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants (Bloomsbury, 2022).

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