Being and Nothingness that among them the work usually went unread. 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
Brian O'Shaughnessy (philosopher) Brian O'Shaughnessy (philosopher) Brian Joseph O'Shaughnessy (10 September 1925 – 7 July 2010) was an Australian philosopher of mind, who lived in London and taught at King's College London. He published influential papers on the nature of physical action and the will, at a time when this was quite unfashionable. He was born in Kew, a suburb of Melbourne in Australia, where his father was a doctor. He studied at Xavier College and then attended Melbourne University, firstly studying engineering before changing to philosophy. He graduated in 1950 and then went to England to continue his studies at Oxford University.