Kate Kirkpatrick

I teach undergraduate papers in Post-Kantian Philosophy (Nietzsche, Sartre), Feminist Theory, Moral Philosophy, and Ethics. I teach a postgraduate option paper on the Philosophy and Feminism of Simone de Beauvoir for the Humanities Division’s MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

Books

• The Second Sex: A Philosophical Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
• Translations available in Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish; Russian (forthcoming).
• with George Pattison, The Mystical Sources of Existentialist Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
• Sartre and Theology (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2017).
• Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Articles 

• ‘The Opium of the Lasses: Beauvoir’s Revaluation of Love in The Second Sex’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 99, Issue 1, July 2025: 167–188.
• ‘Rethinking Beauvoir’, a response to Jonathan Webber’s Rethinking Existentialism in Sartre Studies International, 30/1, 2025: 31–46. 
• ‘Femininity, love, and alienation: the genius of The Second Sex’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1-2) (May 2024): 1–26.
• ‘Beauvoir and Sartre’s “Disagreement” about freedom’, Philosophy Compass, 18(11) (November 2023): 1–14.
• ‘Existentialism and Exemplars’, Educational Theory, 73(5) (October 2023): 762–781.
• ‘Literary Interventions in Justice: A Symposium’, with Rafe McGregor and Karen Simecek, Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LVIII/XIX(2) (2021): 160–178.
• ‘Master, Slave, and Merciless Struggle: Sin and Lovelessness in Sartre’s Saint Genet’, Sartre Studies International, 25(1) (2019): 22–34.
• ‘Sartre: An Augustinian Atheist?’, Sartre Studies International, 21(1) (2016): 1–20.
• ‘Past Her Prime? Simone de Beauvoir on Motherhood and Old Age’, Sophia, 53(2) (2014): 275–287.
• ‘Jean-Paul Sartre: Mystical Atheist or Mystical Antipathist?’ European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 5(2) (2013): 159–168.

Book Contributions

• ‘“You know the story”: Sartre and Kierkegaard beyond Abraham’ in Kierkegaard in France, ed. Andrew Sackin-Poll and Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal, Leiden: Brill, 2025.
• ‘Early Existentialisms’, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy, ed. Daniel Whistler and Mark Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
• ‘Libérer l’imagination : L’émancipation dans la pensée de Simone de Beauvoir’, in La fabrique des sociétés, ed. Catherine Courtet, Mireille Besson, François Lavocat, and François Lecercle (Paris : CNRS Editions, 2024).
• ‘Preface’, to In Dialogue with Michèle Le Dœuff: Philosophies, Encounters, Friendship, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson and Michèle Le Dœuff, London: (Bloomsbury, 2023).
• ‘Introduction’ to Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Ros Schwartz (London: Penguin Classics, 2023).
• ‘Expectant Anxiety in The Second Sex’ in Simone de Beauvoir: A Toolkit for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Liesbeth Schoonheim, and Karen Vintges (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).
• ‘Divine Justice’, in Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, ed. M. Sellers and S. Kirste (Dordrecht: Springer, 2022).
• ‘Pamela Sue Anderson ’in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, in The Philosopher Queens, ed. Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting (London: Unbound, 2020).
• ‘The Life and Work of Simone de Beauvoir’, Philosophy Bites interview with Nigel Warburton in Women of Ideas, ed. Suki Finn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
• ‘Beneath the Surface: Whose Phenomenology? Which Art?’, in Louise Nelstrop and Simon Podmore (eds), Mysticism, Art and Articulation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).
• ‘“A Perpetually Deceptive Mirage”: Blaise Pascal and Jean-Paul Sartre on the Sinful (No)Self’, in Self or No-Self?, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Ingolf Dalferth and Marlene Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).

Kate Kirkpatrick read her BA in Philosophy and Theology at Regent’s Park College and her DPhil at St Cross College, Oxford. Prior to taking up her current position she held lectureships at St Peter’s College, Oxford, the University of Hertfordshire, and King’s College London.