Max Deutscher's genre of philosophy

Max Deutscher has explored questions in the philosophy of mind, linked with ethics and political philosophy. He originally studied analytic philosophy with Gilbert Ryle, then focussed on Jean-Paul Sartre and other phenomenological thinkers to explore questions about the nature of the other. In this paper, I explore some of the central themes and motifs in Max Deutscher’s work, concentrating on conceptions of community and our relation with the other in his reading of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (2003), and noting how a love of the arts informs his approach to philosophy. My interest is in what makes his work distinctive from that of other philosophers, and after providing a context for reading his work, I will concentrate on one example from his book Genre and Void:Looking back at Sartre and Beauvoir (2003) to make the abstract discussion of genre more concrete.