Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (), sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author asserts the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence ("existence precedes essence") and seeks to demonstrate that free will exists. While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927). Heidegger's work, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Edmund Husserl was Heidegger's teacher), initiated Sartre's own philosophical enquiry. Though influenced by Heidegger,
Being and Nothingness Iris Murdoch, writing that continental philosophy shares the same general orientation as English analytic philosophy, compared Sartre's work to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" (1949). According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, "Being and Nothingness" had come to be seen as outdated by the time of Sartre's death in 1980, since, with its emphasis on consciousness, it seemed "tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest." The philosopher David Pears, writing in the anthology "Philosophical essays on Freud" (1982), criticized Sartre's critique of Freud, describing it as complex but