Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Waters Edge (2017)

Ecology and ExistenceBringing Sartre to the Water's Edge\nAuthor(s): Matthew C. Ally\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, United States\nImprint: Lexington Books\nISBN-13: 9780739182888, 978-0739182888\nSynopsis\nThis study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of th.