L'Être et le Néant. Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique.

£3,750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A presentation copy of Being and Nothingness , Sartre’s greatest philosophical work and the foundational text of French existentialism, inscribed by the author ‘A Monsieur Faraggi avec la très sincère sympathie de Jean-Paul Sartre 27 décembre 50’ in black ink to the dedication page. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness owed an enormous debt to the influence of Martin Heidegger, who Sartre had first read in 1940 while interned as a prisoner of war. Its central idea, that “existence precedes essence”, asserts that human beings are not born with any predefined nature. Instead, first and foremost, we are beings that exist in the world, and we establish who we are during the course of lived experiences. Signed copies of any edition are quite uncommon.

• Year: 1943

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