At the outset of The Philosophy of Sartre, Hatzimoysis explains that to achieve a proper understanding of the views expressed in Sartre’s novels, plays, and journals, we must turn to his philosophy, where he is more explicit about his ideas. However, due to Sartre’s numerous publications Hatzimoysis recognizes that formulating a strategy to first engage Sartre’s philosophy may lead to a “sideways approach” to his work. Therefore, he aims at building a contextual framework by focusing on fundamental ideas pertaining to Sartre’s understanding of reality with exegeses on intentionality, emotion, imagining, and being.

Despite the above claim, after a brief preface Hatzimoysis introduces the reader to Sartre’s philosophy through Nausea, one of Sartre’s best known novels. Hatimoysis’s style is very clear and accessible as he builds the foundation for the rest of the book by interpreting Sartre’s understanding of existence through the main character’s attempt to understand the absurdity of his relation to the world.

The aim of the second chapter, as Hatzimoysis tells us, is to understand how the view of intentionality as consciousness necessarily being directed “at something other than peculiarly mental stuff…permeates Sartre’s account of perceptual and affective phenomena” (p. 12). Due to the necessity of introducing some technical jargon, Hatzimoysis begins his analysis of intentionality with a brief explanation of phenomenology (essentially the study of the necessary conditions of possibility for a given experience), using a brief phenomenological description and illuminating the implications drawn from it. If the reader is unfamiliar with phenomenology this will not be an adequate introduction for those pursuing a more rigorous understanding of the method, but adequately serves Hatzimoysis’s purpose as a transition to Sartre’s theory of the ego.

The chapter on the ego is where Hatzimoysis is at his best, with lucid discussions on the pre-reflective/reflective distinction, and the individuality, unity, and temporality of consciousness. A strategy that Hatzimoysis employs throughout the book is to introduce an idea of Sartre’s, give a common interpretation or two of that idea, then offer his own account as to why those interpretations are not plausible. By doing so, he paints a picture of Sartre’s theory in addition to the current dialogue surrounding it, helping to unpack difficult ideas and draw clearer distinctions for the reader to gain a firmer grasp on the material.

In his biggest chapter, Hatizmoysis offers us, again, a dialectical and much-needed sketch of Sartre’s theory of emotion. First, he lays out the general principles of a peripheric theory of emotion and Sartre’s response, then moves to Sartre’s contentions with theories based on behavioral manifestations of emotional experience. Second, Hatzimoysis shifts his focus to Sartre’s critique of psychoanalytic theory and the idea of unconscious emotions, before discussing current problems in experimental psychology. It is here that the book becomes dense with explanations of psychological theory (however brief those explanations are), and blurs Sartre’s critiques and Hatzimoysis’s own reactions (which are, of course, Sartrean). Nevertheless, once Hatzimoysis transitions to Sartre’s view of emotions as “magical transformations” of the world, he again writes with clarity on complicated ideas that have been subjected to various interpretations.

Hatzimoysis’s chapter on imagination opens with a discussion on the distinction between imagination and imaging, and problems raised with the notion of “analogon,” Sartre’s term “for denoting any type of content, awareness of which presents us with an absent object” (94). What may be most impressive to the reader in this chapter arrives at the final section when, after slowly building Sartre’s theory of imagination, Hatzimoysis pulls it all together and formulates in analytic style Sartre’s account of imagination as “an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness” (101).

Finally, the last chapter on being is limited to the introduction of Being and Nothingness. Here Hatzimoysis explains Sartre’s monism in detail and points to Sartre’s assertion that although we can, through phenomenological analysis, dismiss the dualistic separation of appearance and being, such a monism must accommodate certain oppositions to our experience, such as inside and outside, potency and actuality, and appearance and essence. Upon doing so Hatzimoysis returns full circle to existence, drawing the distinction between “phenomenon of being” and “being of phenomenon,” explaining to us Sartre’s claim that to each appearance there is existence conditioning it. Contra viewing existence as a quality or property of being, existence is presupposed as a transcendental condition for the revelation of being to consciousness, “unreal” or not.

Early in the book Hatzimoysis explained that his intended audience is upper-level undergraduates and post graduate students — the same he’s been teaching this material to for the past decade. After experiencing the clarity with which Hatzimoysis writes in explicating some of the most difficult ideas found in Sartre’s literary corpus, it is easy to see why Philosophy of Sartre is included in the Continental European Philosophy introductory series to various philosophers. What I find to be most exciting is Hatzimoysis’s realist interpretation of Sartre’s work, and defense against some of the most common and powerful arguments used against certain readings of Sartre that are at times unfair to the actual text.

With The Philosophy of Sartre Hatzimoysis seems to have reached his goal of providing a clear contextual framework to Sartre’s view of reality as a foundation for approaching his work as a whole.

© 2012 Adam Kohler

Adam Kohler recently finished Stony Brook University’s M.A. in philosophy program.