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,
Adrian Johnston (philosopher) Adrian Johnston (philosopher) Adrian Johnston is an American philosopher. He is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. Influenced by Žižek and his readings of German idealism, Johnston’s work has gained many readers among those making the materialist and realist turns in Continental philosophy. Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity. Johnston argues for retooling Freud and Lacan