Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Can I just say?
0:01.5	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:04.0	It's such a wonderful listen.
0:05.6	So nice.
0:06.5	There are loads more like it on BBC sounds.
0:08.8	Different paces, different heights.
0:10.6	The roof is buckling.
0:11.9	Where you can also listen to live sports commentary.
0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:35.8	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:40.4	In 1947, the New Yorker magazine called her the prettiest existentialist you ever saw.
0:47.3	And even now, some still regard her as simply one half of a philosophical power couple.
0:52.3	But who was Simone de Beauvoir? Why does her work matter and
0:56.4	what is her enduring legacy? Join me, Shahide Abari, and my guests for the Arts and Ideas podcast
1:02.5	just after this. Hello, I'm Eleanor Rosamond Baraklough and I'm here to tell you about the
1:08.7	Green Thinking podcast. In the run up to COP 26, we're releasing
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.