Course Adoption

For Instructors

The book is written to be teachable in parts. What follows is a chapter map for building a syllabus, suggested pairings with the primary texts, and a request form for examination and desk copies.

Chapter Map

Four routes through the volume

The chapters are ordered as an argument, but four self-contained sequences can be assigned on their own. Each is described by what it requires the student to have read, not by a fixed number of weeks.

Route Chapters What it covers Suited to
The ontology Introduction, One through Four The two regions of being, the expulsion of the ego, nothingness and negation, and freedom as the being of the for-itself. An existentialism or phenomenology survey.
The distinction Five and Six Facticity, situation, the Other and the look, the body, the two registers formalized, and bad faith. A seminar on freedom and situation; readable after Chapter Four alone.
The social turn Seven and Eight Anguish, situated answerability, the distribution principle, praxis, scarcity, the practico-inert, seriality, the group, and institutions as architectures of answerability. Social and political philosophy, and professional-ethics courses.
The stress tests Nine through Eleven, and the Conclusion Many hands, manipulation, culpable ignorance, structural injustice, standing to blame, the objections from Merleau-Ponty and the determinist, and the objections to the book's own thesis. A moral-responsibility seminar; readable without the ontology chapters.

The full section-by-section list is on the contents page. Browse the contents

Pairings

Suggested pairings with the primary texts

The book cites the primary works by internal division rather than by page, precisely so that a class can be assigned any available edition without the citations breaking.

Read alongside Primary text Note
Chapters One and Three Being and Nothingness, the Introduction and Part One Any edition of the Barnes translation. The book abbreviates the work BN and cites by part, chapter, and titled section.
Chapter Two The Transcendence of the Ego Short enough to assign whole, and it makes the emptiness of consciousness concrete before the ontology becomes demanding.
Chapters Four through Six Being and Nothingness, Part One chapter two and Part Four Bad faith and the long treatment of having, doing, and being, where the strongest formulations of absolute freedom appear.
Chapter Seven Existentialism Is a Humanism; Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity Pairing the lecture with Beauvoir sets up the dispute the chapter addresses directly.
Chapter Eight Search for a Method; Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One Search for a Method is the practicable assignment for most courses; the Critique can be sampled at the sections on scarcity, the practico-inert, and seriality.
Chapters Nine and Ten Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Young, Responsibility for Justice The Merleau-Ponty objection and the social connection model are the two positions the stress tests engage most closely.

Full entries for every work named here appear in the Table of References.

Request

Examination and desk copies

An address at the institution named below speeds review.

Which chapters you expect to assign, and, for a permission request, the passage and the intended use.

What a request is, and is not

Submitting this form is a request, not an approval. Examination and desk copies are supplied at the publisher's discretion and subject to availability. A reply will follow by email.

Ordering for a class

Campus bookstores and library acquisitions may order by ISBN 979-8-234-17877-0. The hardcover list price is $39.99.

Course packs and reserves

Reproducing a chapter for a course pack or an electronic reserve requires written permission. Select syllabus excerpt permission above and identify the passage and the number of students.

A free reading for students

The Preface and Introduction are published in full on this site and may be linked from a syllabus without further permission.

The excerpt

Open material to assign alongside it

Three pages of this site are built for teaching and sit behind no paywall. The contents lists every chapter with its numbered sections, which is enough to assign a single chapter without the volume in hand. The glossary glosses the vocabulary a seminar needs in its first week. The two registers page states the distinction the book turns on, at a length suited to one session.

For students meeting Sartre for the first time, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Jean-Paul Sartre and on Existentialism are open access and peer reviewed. They are background rather than a substitute, and neither takes the position this book defends.