The Saint and the Atheist: Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre scholar Catalano (Reading Sartre) draws on 30 years of study for this brisk if perhaps overly condensed overview of the French philosopher’s thought, with a focus on how St. Thomas Aquinas influenced Sartre’s philosophy on “the reality and force of human freedom.” Aquinas’s theses about epistemology (“the natural world was real, and encountered through the senses”) and the nature of good and evil were further developed by Sartre, Catalano claims, in ways that can “aid us in understanding our world.” Reading like a series of lecture notes, the book ranges through Sartre’s thoughts about “being,” “nothingness,” and the dialectic, as well as the philosopher’s biographies of Gustave Flaubert and Jean Genet (while also scattering in references to Aristotle, Augustine, and Freud). Catalano dwells on the concepts of “good faith” (defined in contrast with bad faith, “the unwillingness to use our freedom properly”), the difference between external and internal senses, and the “tension between the truth that we are all human and the truth that we are each unique.” For all of Catalano’s insight, his work will be of limited value to readers who are new to both Sartre and Aquinas, but longtime admirers of either figure will find the author’s unique perspective enriching. (Jan.)