Dr Kate Kirkpatrick

BIOGRAPHY

Kate is Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at St Peter's College, Oxford. Her doctoral research focused on the atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as a phenomenologist of fallenness. Drawing on Sartre’s philosophical and literary works from the 1930s and early 1940s, she argues that Sartre’s description of consciousness – as radically free, ‘haunted by being’, and estranged from others – has recognizable antecedents in the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. In addition to making this historical and exegetical case, Kate’s thesis also argues that Sartre’s graceless account of sin is a valuable resource for contemporary hamartiology.