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Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism

Philosophy Bites

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Sartre's Greatest Contribution to British Philosophy

The great thing that Sartre brought, certainly brought to British philosophy when eventually as it were he crossed the channel, was that he was brilliant at producing real examples. He used a famous example of a student who allegedly really came to see him in wartime with this dilemma. Should he stay at home with his mother or should he join the free French and fight the Nazis? Yes. That was a wonderfully vivid example of that being a genuine choice for the student. And nobody could make it for him. I mean starting from the 1930s there was now a very obscure philosopher called Prichard who wrote about moral philosophy. But whose examples were all absolutely preposterously unrealistic and uninteresting.

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