Simone de Beauvoir is often placed in the shadow of Sartre, read first and foremost as an existentialist first. But what if we’ve been missing something crucial? In this episode of Daybreak, we uncover Beauvoir’s critical phenomenology—a method that doesn’t just describe experience but interrogates the structures of power, embodiment, and oppression that shape it.

This episode explores a recent paper by Johanna Oksala, “The Method of Critical Phenomenology: Simone de Beauvoir as a Phenomenologist”. With Tobias Keiling, Clarissa Müller-Kosmarov, and Andrew Cooper, Johanna identifies how Beauvoir reworks phenomenology to account for gender, freedom, and lived experience in ways that surpass Husserl and Heidegger. What does it mean to approach philosophy as both description and critique? And why is Beauvoir’s method still urgent today? Here's a link to Johanna’s paper.