Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group Talk (David Suarez, Toronto)

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Interest Group is pleased to welcome as a speaker David Suarez, a part-time assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at U of T. His research is focused on understanding subjectivity and its place in the natural world. His work draws on Kant, and the history of post-Kantian philosophy, so as to frame and address problems in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. One of Dr. Suarez’s central aims is to show that understanding the natural conditions that make the world available to us requires us to reconceive nature along the lines explored by phenomenologists.

Talk Title

Amphiboly in Sartrean Bad Faith

Talk Abstract

I offer a critical response to the recent suggestion by McNulty that Sartre is a dialetheist. My interpretive thesis is that Sartre’s paradoxical formulation in Being and Nothingness that human reality “is what it is not, and that is not what it is” is a rhetorical flourish that elides the distinction between human reality’s different modes of being. This elision makes it seem that he is talking about being and not being in a univocal sense, such that attributing being F and not being F to the same entity would result in a contradiction. Sartre’s actual view is that being is not a univocal concept: there are different senses of being, namely being in-itself and being for-itself. Sartre allows being to be said in at least these two ways, and explicitly flags the importance of distinguishing between them. The duplicity of bad faith is enabled by improper conceptualization of what are, in fact, two distinct modes of being through a single, univocal concept of being that blends the features of both. Sartre describes this concept as ‘amphibolic’ [amphibolique], which suggests (on an analogy with Kant’s use of the term ‘amphiboly’), that bad faith depends on a confusion in the application of a concept — not on a true contradiction which obtains in reality.

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Group is a a subgroup of the History of Philosophy Research Group, which focuses on European philosophy in Kant and post-Kantian traditions.