born March 14, 1908, Rochefort, France
died May 4, 1961, Paris
French philosopher.
With Simone de Beauvoir he founded the journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945. From 1949 he taught at the Sorbonne. He was the leading exponent of phenomenology in France. Though greatly influenced by {{link=Husserl, Edmund">Edmund Husserl , he rejected Husserl's theory of our knowledge of other persons, grounding his own view instead in bodily behaviour and perception. He defended Soviet communism until the Korean War, when he became disillusioned.