Professor Emerita Margaret A. (Peg) Simons of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville is the recipient of the 2021 Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy (ESWIP) Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award, which she received at the 2022 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
I was among those who wrote letters of support for the distinguished honoree not only because of the high regard I have for Professor Simons’s research, scholarship, teaching, and citizenship to the profession but also because of my knowledge of how highly her work in each of these areas is regarded worldwide. Peg, as I came to know her, is a proverbial force of nature guided by a commitment to the empowering of communities of women and men often occluded by the dynamics of colonialism, sexism, racism, and other forms of dehumanization. Her decades of work in professional philosophy exemplifies this value. I can say without reservation that the philosopher of whom she most reminds me is the late Hazel Barnes, who was a recipient of this honor.
I knew of Professor Simons’s work in Beauvoir studies and existentialism before she contacted me for a collaborative project that has affected research in those fields and several related ones over the past several years. We worked together in 2013 for a joint meeting of the Beauvoir Society, the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and the North American Sartre Society under the title of Diverse Lineages of Existentialism and Shifting the Geography of Reason. The conference was held in Saint Louis in the summer of 2014. I have collaborated with many colleagues over the years. Working with Professor Simons stands among the best. I had the good fortune to visit Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE) along the way, at which I enjoyed meeting her many students and wonderful colleagues and at which I gave a public lecture on Black existential philosophy. The spirit of that visit was marked by one of Professor Simons’s great virtues: she stands among those scholars whose efforts bring diverse communities together in life-affirming practice. Excitement among the students came from the intellectual nutrition they were clearly receiving from her mentorship and classes. They were in love with ideas, and they understood, with reflective clarity, relationships between conceptual reflection and social reality. Every one of her students with whom I spoke was involved in projects informed by the existential reminder of not taking oneself too seriously but, instead, dedication to doing what makes—in true Beauvoirian fashion—life meaningful as a practice of freedom. That energy was brought to our conference, which had the participation not only of philosophers but also major literary figures of existential orientation such as Frieda Ekotto, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Abdul JanMohamed.
I compare Professor Peg Simons to the late Professor Hazel Barnes because of her own philosophical writings and her editing and translations of important scholarship on canonical figures in the field. Professor Simons is a relational thinker. By this, I mean she is interested more in connections than eliminations. That is why, before it came into vogue, her work was intersectional and multidimensional. She was writing about how Beauvoir’s ideas on freedom and gender connected with Richard Wright’s on freedom and race. This dimension of her work enabled her to be in conversation with philosophers and other kinds of theorists from the Global South. Her Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (1999) is an influential monograph in that regard. That work makes her thought valuable in Black existentialism and philosophy of race in addition to feminist philosophy. That work, among her numerous writings, led to her playing a significant role in the recent wave of scholarship on Richard Wright, as stated in recent work on his thought. The connections between Beauvoir and Wright are often overlooked because of Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre. Professor Simons’s work is the singularly most influential in pointing out the Beauvoir-Wright line of existential thought, which, of course, is key to building other connections such as how other Black existential feminist writings ranging from Nella Larsen to Lorraine Hansberry through to what could now be called a wave of philosophical writings in Black existential feminism as evidenced in the writings of Kathryn Belle, Qrescent Mason, Claudia Millian, Nathalie Etoke, Gail Weiss, LaRose Parris, and Jane Anna Gordon, among many others (including the author of this testimony). This community of feminist philosophers and theorists have also benefited from Professor Simons’s The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays (2006), the Beauvoir series for the University of Illinois Press, her Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995, for Penn State University Press’ Re-Reading the Canon series). To all this I should like to add that Professor Simons’s work on Beauvoir’s influence on Sartre has had an impact on how I read their thought from the 1940s. I now teach Being and Nothingness (French original, 1943), for instance, as a book in which there are sections that should be read as co-authored. This is important not only because it acknowledges Beauvoir’s unheralded contributions to that great work but also because it challenges us to rethink how great philosophical work is produced. There is already the existentialist argument of the work having its life through its readers and, thus, lacking a prior essence as would any other manifestation of human reality; but what is crucial here is that understanding intellectual work as produced by communities through which specific authors acquire the tag of authorship is an important consideration beyond the egocentric, often masculinist models of agonal intervention.
An existential phenomenological intervention is one in which demonstration enables, through ongoing communication, communities come to see what they failed to see, hear what they failed to hear, understand what they failed to understand. I mention this because it offers insight into the seamless integration of teaching and citizenship in Professor Simon’s work. She understands that ideas don’t float willy-nilly but, instead, require institutions through which to gain their intelligibility and affect people’s lives. This is no doubt why Professor Simons was among the founding editors of the journal Hypatia and the reason for her having co-directed the Society of Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The convergence of all these elements results in the impact of her work among philosophers not only in the United States but also in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Senegal, South Africa, and the United Kingdom in Africana philosophy, decolonial philosophy, Eurocontinental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and in disciplines such as comparative literature and social and political theory.
The Yale Journal of French Studies (2019) recently produced a special issue commemorating the seventieth anniversary of its groundbreaking issue on existentialism. The editors rightly knew that they would be remiss not to have an essay from Professor Simons. My own contribution to that issue, “French- and Francophone-Influenced Africana and Black Existentialism,” is indebted to Professor Simons’s groundbreaking work on the friendship and exchange of ideas between Beauvoir and Wright.
To conclude, Professor Simons’s overall work as a scholar, philosopher in her own right, teacher, and citizen of the profession is already distinguished. Her being selected for this award is an acknowledgement of her dedicated career of excellence and, as many from Anna Julia Cooper to Rosa Luxemburg to Simone Beauvoir to Hazel Barnes would put it, commitment to the production of ideas as a practice of cultivating freedom.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
