ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Jean-Paul Sartre’s epistemology, that his views on the interpretation of human beings, praxis and socio-historical reality. Sartre poses the epistemological problem as a problem of truth and meaning. Sartre is both concerned with understanding, or meaning, and with the Truth of Man and the Truth of History. Thomas Flynn and Steve Hendley largely following Flynn, have shed some new light on Sartre’s views on epistemology. Flynn distinguishes between an epistemology of vision — which dominates Sartre’s early philosophy in EN — and an epistemology of praxis — which dominates his later thinking. In Vérité et existence Sartre distinguishes between two modes of truth. Truth, he says, may be dead or alive. Living truth is a becoming, or a continuous process of unveiling, while dead truths are the result of a process that has come to an end.
