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Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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The french existentialist Simone de Beauvoir thought a lot about authenticity, but what did she mean for an act to be authentic?
What does it mean to choose authentically?
These are questions that the philosopher Skye Cleary has chosen freely and authentically to investigate.
Skye Cleary, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you, Nigel.
Thanks for having me.
The topic we're going to focus on today is authenticity.
I wonder if you could just begin by saying what you mean by authenticity.
Yeah, I see authenticity as a person creating an authentic life.
And I'm coming at it from Simone de Beauvoir's perspective, and she defines it as the process of creating your essence.
Okay, so essence, in common parlance, means the thing at the very heart of something.
Is that what you mean by essence?
I do, but I mean something slightly different from an existential perspective.
Existence precedes essence, meaning that we exist first.
We're thrown into the world.