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
Christian Wolff (philosopher) Christian Wolff (philosopher) Christian Wolff (less correctly Wolf, ; also known as Wolfius; ennobled as Christian Freiherr von Wolff; 24 January 1679 – 9 April 1754) was a German philosopher. Wolff was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. His main achievement was a complete "oeuvre" on almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which perhaps represents the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany. Wolff was also the creator of German as the language of scholarly instruction and research, although he also wrote in Latin, so that an international