Colloquium: Daniela Dover (Rutgers University)

Title: “No Promises: Beauvoir on Time, Agency, and Freedom" 

Abstract: Most people nowadays, especially in the Anglophone world, first encounter Simone de Beauvoir through her 1949 magnum opus the Second Sex. But in a conversation with a biographer near the end of her life, Beauvoir mentioned only two books as particularly important for understanding her oeuvre. These were her two book-length works of moral philosophy, Pyrrhus and Cineas, from 1944, and Toward an Ethics of Ambiguity, from 1947. These works have until very recently received very little philosophical attention, often being treated as mere background to The Second Sex. Yet we argue that they lay the groundwork for a genuinely novel, promising, and systematic moral theory that parallels but also radically transforms Kant’s approach to moral theory in the Groundwork. In this paper, we explore several of that theory's more surprising implications, including that our ordinary practice of promising is morally suspect.