Kick-starting second-wave feminism with her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir was a key member of the Parisian circle of Existentialists alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Her philosophical influences include Descartes and Bergson, phenomenology via Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the assessment of society put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and ideas about idealism from Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel.

Kathryn Belle is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

Skye Cleary is Lecturer, Barnard College

Lauren Elkin is a Writer and translator of Simone de Beauvoir's The Inseparables, which follows two friends growing up and falling apart.

Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford

Recorded in partnership with LSE Forum for Philosophy. You can find a playlist of Free Thinking discussions about philosophy on the programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx

Producer: Luke Mulhall