Being and Nothingness

“This is a book that was published during the Second World War in occupied Paris by Sartre, who has since become known as a great existentialist thinker alongside his lifelong friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir. Being and Nothingness became the Bible of existentialism…Although this book is threateningly abstract in places, it’s also fundamentally practical. It’s about the nature of what it is to be human…For me personally, I became interested in studying philosophy because I wanted to try and understand some of Being and Nothingness and Sartre’s ideas…You’d be surprised how many philosophers have been inspired by Sartre, even though they’ve gone on to become very different sorts of philosophers from him…Being and Nothingness has got these amazing novelistic passages. Most famously, there’s the example of the café waiter. Sartre is sitting in a café, watching a waiter who he thinks is in ‘bad faith.’ It’s a kind of self-deception, a denial of his own freedom to be other than he is in terms of his role and what other people expect him to be.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2018

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher