IB Philosophy 10.11 the Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir Key Definitions

In de Beauvoir's existentialism, active transcendence is the purposeful engagement with the world through which human beings create meaning, pursue projects, and assert their freedom against the forces of immanence and oppression.

Agency is the capacity of an individual to act intentionally and make choices, exercising control over actions and their consequences.

In de Beauvoir's existentialism, ambiguity refers to the fundamental condition of human existence in which consciousness is simultaneously free and situated, capable of transcendence yet always embedded in a concrete social and bodily reality.

In de Beauvoir's existentialism, authentic freedom is the condition achieved when an individual recognises the full reality of her situation, including the structures of oppression that constrain her, and actively works to transcend those constraints through purposeful projects and solidarity with others.

Biological determinism is the view that women's social position and subordinate status are determined by biological facts such as reproductive capacity and physical strength. De Beauvoir argues that while biological differences between the sexes are real, they do not in themselves prescribe any particular social role or hierarchy.

Gendered socialisation describes the process through which children learn and internalise the behaviours, attitudes, and identities that their culture defines as appropriate for their sex. De Beauvoir argues this channels girls away from autonomy and self-assertion and toward passivity, compliance, and dependence.

Moral responsibility is the status of being worthy of praise or blame for one's actions, typically requiring that the agent acted freely, with knowledge of what they were doing, and with the capacity to have done otherwise.

Psychological continuity, associated with John Locke, is the view that personal identity consists in overlapping chains of memory, consciousness, and psychological connection linking earlier and later stages of a person's life, prioritising mental over physical continuity as the criterion of personal identity.

For de Beauvoir, situated freedom is the recognition that human freedom is never abstract or unlimited but always exercised from within a particular social, historical, and bodily situation that shapes its possibilities.

In de Beauvoir's framework, structural oppression refers to the interlocking systems of cultural norms, economic arrangements, and institutional practices that constrain women's freedom regardless of individual merit or effort.

In de Beauvoir's analysis, the illusion of freedom describes the condition in which women who have achieved economic independence and professional status remain constrained by internalised norms and structural inequalities that prevent genuine transcendence.

Originally Hegel's account of how self-consciousness arises through a struggle for recognition, the master-slave dialectic is adapted by de Beauvoir to argue that the relationship between men and women mirrors this dynamic, with men assuming the role of subject and women relegated to the position of dependent Other.