Being and Nothingness First Edition - Jean Paul Sartre - Bauman Rare Books

Being and Nothingness

Jean Paul SARTRE

Item#: 112851 We're sorry, this item has been sold

Being and Nothingness

"SARTRE'S VOICE RINGS THROUGH": FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH OF BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, 1956

SARTRE, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Philosophical Library, (1956). Thick octavo, original half blue cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition in English of a defining existentialist work by Sartre—"one of the very few 20th-century philosophers to present us with a total system"—in original dust jacket.

Written during the Nazi occupation of France, Being and Nothingness is considered Sartre's greatest philosophical endeavor and a core work of existentialism. To Joseph Catalano it stands alone "in the history of philosophy in its attempt to stretch the finite to provide a complete ontology of being" (Commentary, xiii). "Sartre's fame probably reached its peak in 1964, when he was offered the Nobel Prize for literature and turned it down. He explained at that time that he thought a writer 'should refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution'" (New York Times). In Hazel Barnes' translation herein of L'Etre et le neant, "Sartre's voice rings through" (France, ed., Oxford Guide, 297). With Barnes' preface and introduction. Preceded by the 1943 French first edition. With selections of Barnes' translation earlier appearing in Existential Psychoanalysis (1953). Mahaffey, 272.

Book fine; light edge-wear to spine ends of bright near-fine dust jacket.

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