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Cover of The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

The Ethics of Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir

  • 159 pages · about 3 hours
  • First published 1947
  • 28 editions
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1 About this book

The Ethics of Ambiguity (French: Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté) is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work and a philosophical work of existentialist ethics. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, where she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness (French: L'Être et le néant).

The following year, over a six-month period, she took on the challenge, publishing the resulting text first as three installments in Les Temps modernes, (Sartre's Journal, which she also co-founded) in November 1947, as a book. The Ethics of Ambiguity follows the phenomenological tradition.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • Ethics
  • Existentialism
  • Modern Philosophy
  • Theoretical
  • Jean Paul Sartre

2 About Simone de Beauvoir

1908–1986

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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