Editorial

It is not the first time that this editorial page has drawn attention to the capacity of Sartre studies to fascinate and engage successive generations of scholars. In this issue they seek: to understand Sartre's intellectual genetics as an emerging scholar, to analyse how his thinking was formed and influenced by Descartes, and to evaluate how he was perceived as a public intellectual, and how he perceived himself. And also to dialogue on how Sartre's thought can provide a potentially positive lens through which to see a way through and beyond the current crisis in the Middle East.