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The first philosophical essay from one of the preeminent existentialist philosophers of the 20th century
 
Pyrrhus and Cinéas
Simone de Beauvoir
Paris, 1944
 
First edition, “service de presse” review copy.  Original publisher’s wrappers – some spotting to the top edge, otherwise a lightly used, uncut and unopened, Fine copy.  
 
"Pyrrhus and Cinéas addresses such fundamental ethical and political issues as: What are the criteria of ethical action? How can I distinguish ethical from unethical political projects? What are the principles of ethical relationships? Can violence ever be justified? It examines these questions from an existential-phenomenological perspective. Taking the situation of the concrete existing individual as its point of departure, it provides an analysis of the ways that as particular subjects we are necessarily embedded in the world, and inescapably related to others. Though not feminist in any identifiable sense, Pyrrhus and Cinéas raises such compelling feminist questions as: Under what conditions, if any, may I speak for/in the name of another?”
 
“There are some thinkers who are, from the very beginning, unambiguously identified as philosophers (e.g., Plato). There are others whose philosophical place is forever contested (e.g., Nietzsche); and there are those who have gradually won the right to be admitted into the philosophical fold. Simone de Beauvoir is one of these belatedly acknowledged philosophers. Identifying herself as an author rather than as a philosopher and calling herself the midwife of Sartre’s existential ethics rather than a thinker in her own right, Beauvoir’s place in philosophy had to be won against her word. That place is now uncontested…Her enduring contributions to the fields of ethics, politics, existentialism, phenomenology and feminist theory and her significance as an activist and public intellectual is now a matter of record.”(Stanford)