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Sartre and the Imagination: Top Shelf Magazines

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Abstract

This article looks at Sartre’s varied description of the imagination applied to some ethically awkward aspects of non-thetic awareness, focussing on specific ‘photographic analogues’—the nudes displayed on Top Shelf magazine racks. Throughout this imaginative process, his phenomenological aspect of nothingness continuously enhances perception and imagination. An expanded account on the roles of affect, belief and knowledge essential to all that is missing is explored—as something that provides more than we can ever see in reality.

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Notes

  1. http://www.dailyinfographic.com/the-stats-on-internet-pornography-infographic.

  2. Standard Note: SN/HA/203, 2014.

  3. https://www.nfrnonline.com/News-Magazines/How-do-I-get-a-supply/Legal-Advice/Guidance-on-Displaying-Adult-Titles.

  4. Not a quotation.

  5. Sartre will insist that we confront freedom and responsibility even in non-thetic awareness via the prereflective cogito.

  6. This may remind us of certain readers who consume the gutter press specifically so that they can condemn the contents.

  7. It is not clear whether Strawson had read Sartre—but it seems not.

  8. Contemporary philosophers might be chary of Sartre‘s use of the term ‘knowledge’. Analytical philosophers will say one cannot know something that is false, so how could such a term be concerned with fictions surrounding the imagination? Although Sartre identifies knowledge with ideation and a thetic awareness involving reflection, and Sartre’s “I think”, does not delve into propositional aspects involving principles of verification and truth ascription. Indeed, phenomenology, as a whole, is often oblique when it comes to notions of truth, relying on the self-evidency of subjective states.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, Assumption University, Hua Mak, Bangkok, Thailand

    John G. Wilson

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  1. John G. Wilson
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Correspondence to John G. Wilson.

Glossary

PI

The Psychology of Imagination

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Being and Nothingness

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Wilson, J.G. Sartre and the Imagination: Top Shelf Magazines. Sexuality & Culture 20, 775–784 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9358-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9358-x

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