Skye teaches and Columbia and the City University of New York, and she recently published How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment.

She joins Mark and Bill to talk about what authenticity might mean for an existentialist, how it relates to truth, responsibility, and picking a theme for your birthday party.

For more on this ladder of authenticity, i.e. Beauvoir’s take on ways of lacking, see PEL’s episodes on her Ethics of Ambiguity.

The art was snatched off naturalsciences.org, author unknown. Why is it a picture of a snake? Well, I’d called this episode “Authentic Snake Oil,” but Skye didn’t like that much. I was not implying her book is snake oil! As a side note: Is something snake oil as in inauthentic if it in fact oil from a snake and advertised as such? It is authentic but in being so is clearly not “snake oil” in the colloquial sense despite its literal identity as such. In any case, to repeat, Skye’s book is neither snaky nor oily

Audio editing by Tyler Hislop; check out his new Pixel Box Media podcast.

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