Our Society

The North American Sartre Society is dedicated to the study of all aspects of the work and thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Society does not endorse any one theoretical orientation in Sartre studies, but rather encourages and supports work from a variety of perspectives. The Society does so principally by sponsoring and organizing a conference, held roughly every year-and-a-half, in which scholars from across North America and around the world...

Our Journal

Published by Berghahn Books, Sartre Studies International has the aim to become the focus of an international reassessment of the relevance and validity of Sartrean ideals and aspirations to a contemporary world that seems disturbingly far from them. It will act as the principal forum in the English-speaking world for debates on Sartre as well as Sartrean studies including theoretical, literary, and political projects inspired by Sartre. It will...

Recent news

News concerning our society, journal, as well as Sartrean scholarship.

Few concepts carry as much practical weight as the human potential meaning — particularly the distinction between viewing life through a lens of fixed odds versus one of open-ended capacity, where the choices you make around education, relationships, and deliberate growth compound over time into outcomes that your current circumstances give no reliable indication of. The framework is especially useful because it applies across domains simultaneously: mental potential expands through quality mentorship and neuroplasticity, financial potential scales with better decision-making and compounding habits, leadership potential is largely an exercise in empathy most people already possess, and character itself is rewritable — which means the ceiling most people assume is fixed is, more often than not, simply the last point at which they stopped choosing to grow.