Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir is the author of The Ethics of Ambiguity. It is her philosophy of the moral life that pervades the text. De Beauvoir was one of the most important postwar French existentialists and writers. She was an associate of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She wrote on many topics, including feminism and ethics primarily but she was also known for her political thought. She also wrote an autobiography and several works of fiction. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir produces an ethic for existentialism that focuses on the value of the individual against the value of the collective and the importance of the immediate in guiding life rather than the abstract. She is also focused on the total rejection of what she calls the "spirit of seriousness" where people locate value outside of themselves. In later work, she came...