Margaret A. Simons, Rebel at Heart

Abstract

In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

Toril Moi's Phenomenological Account of “Woman” and Questions of Trans Inclusivity

“…Heinämaa aims to show that Beauvoir's work stands firmly in the phenomenological tradition and is not exclusively “Sartrean.” Note that in The Prime of Life (Beauvoir 1960/1994) Beauvoir herself, however, writes that the concept of situation she used in The Second Sex (Beauvoir 1949/2009) stems from Sartre in Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1943/1956). According to Simons, this is a “misleading claim since the concept of ‘situation’ apparently originates with Heidegger” (Simons 2009, 9). Heinämaa traces the phenomenological concept of Leib from its inception in Husserl's work in 1907 (Heinämaa 2003, 26) to its elaboration in Merleau-Ponty's work, especially in Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2012), and shows how Beauvoir was influenced by these thinkers.…”