Ron Santoni

Ronald E. Santoni, the Maria Theresa Barney Professor Emeritus at Denison University and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was one of the six invited international scholars who participated in a special two-day roundtable colloquium at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland on March 17-18.

The international colloquium, titled “Zur Aktualität Jean-Paul Sartres: Philosophie, Literatur, Politik,” brought together specialists on the philosophy of Sartre—two each from France, Germany and North America—to present and discuss their papers.

Santoni, who has published extensively on Sartre, and is both coordinator of the Sartre Circle and member of the Executive Committee of the North American Sartre Society, presented his paper, titled, “The Pervasiveness of ‘Bad Faith’ in Sartre’s Philosophy—and the Continuing Impact of it.”

Other presenters included Michel Sicard, Paris, a noted artist and specialist on Sartre’s aesthetics; Ronald Aronson, Detroit, one of the foremost writers on Sartre’s political thought; Ingrid Galster, Eichstätt, Germany, a scholar whose primary focus is Sartre’s plays written during the Second World War; Vincent von Wroblewsky, Berlin, president of the Jean-Paul Sartre Society in Germany; and Annie Cohen-Solal, Paris/New York, a noted Sartre biographer and France’s former cultural ambassador to the United States.

The papers presented at this colloquium will be published in a forthcoming book.

The event was sponsored and organized by Universtät Luzern, and Santoni and the other colloquists were guests of the university for three days. All related expenses for the colloquium and speakers were covered by a gift to the university by a Lucerne benefactor, who sought to have greater representation of French philosophy at the predominantly German-speaking university.