Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Available for over a year

Kick-starting second-wave feminism with her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir was a key member of the Parisian circle of Existentialists alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Her philosophical influences include Descartes and Bergson, phenomenology via Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the assessment of society put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and ideas about idealism from Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel. Shahidha Bari and her guests consider her role in contemporary philosophy and Lauren Elkin describes translating a newly discovered novel The Inseparables. Kathryn Belle is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University Skye Cleary is Lecturer, Barnard College Lauren Elkin is a Writer and translator of Simone de Beauvoir's The Inseparables, which follows two friends growing up and falling apart. Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford Recorded in partnership with LSE Forum for Philosophy. You can find a playlist of Free Thinking discussions about philosophy on the programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx You can find a Radio 3 Sunday Feature hearing from some of our guests and archive of Simone de Beauvoir called Afterwords: Simone de Beauvoir https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011m4h Producer: Luke Mulhall Image: Simone de Beauvoir Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images