Nothing And Beingness

First published in French in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant is one of the greatest philosophical works of the twentieth century. In it, Sartre offers nothing less than a brilliant and radical account of the human condition. The English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote to a friend of "the excitement – I remember nothing like it since the days of discovering Keats and Shelley and Coleridge". This new translation, the first for over sixty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. What gives our lives significance, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, is not pre-established for us by God or nature but is something for which we ourselves are responsible. At the heart of this view are Sartre’s radical conceptions of consciousness and freedom. Far from being an internal, passive container for our thoughts and experiences, human consciousness is constantly projecting itself into the outside world and imbuing it with meaning. Combining this with the unsettling view that human existence is characterized by radical freedom and the inescapability of choice, Sartre introduces us to a cast of ideas and characters that are part of philosophical legend: anguish; the "bad faith" of the memorable waiter in the café; sexual desire; and the "look" of the Other, brought to life by Sartre’s famous description of someone looking through a keyhole. Above all, by arguing that we alone create our values and that human relationships are characterized by hopeless conflict, Sartre paints a stark and controversial picture of our moral universe and one that resonates strongly today. This new translation includes a helpful Translator’s Introduction, a comprehensive Index and a Foreword by Richard Moran, Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University, USA. Translated by Sarah Richmond, University College London, UK.

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole of Being and Nothingness more readily understandable and readable. . . . In his systematic interpretations of Sartre's book, [Catalano] demonstrates a determination to confront many of the most demanding issues and concepts of Being and Nothingness. He does not shrink—as do so many interpreters of Sartre—from such issues as the varied meanings of 'being,' the meaning of 'internal negation' and 'absolute event,' the idiosyncratic senses of transcendence, the meaning of the 'upsurge' in its different contexts, what it means to say that we 'exist our body,' the connotation of such concepts as quality, quantity, potentiality, and instrumentality (in respect to Sartre's world of 'things'), or the origin of negation. . . . Catalano offers what is doubtless one of the most probing, original, and illuminating interpretations of Sartre's crucial concept of nothingness to appear in the Sartrean literature."—Ronald E. Santoni, International Philosophical Quarterly

Nothing and beingness is an exploration of a human year of life in poetry. It may apply to you or/and someone you know.

A new 2024 translation of Martin Heidegger's major work "Being and Time" (Sein und Zeit), originally published in 1927 in multiple publications. This edition contains a new afterword by the Translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading. Being and Time presents a complex philosophical discourse on the nature of being (Sein) and time (Zeit), focusing in particular on the temporal-existentialist concept of Dasein, a term that combines the German words for "to be" (sein) and "there" (da). This classic philosophic work examines the traditional metaphysical understanding of being, arguing that this understanding, typically based on the idea of a constant presence, fails to account for the temporal and existential dimensions of being. Heidegger proposes that an understanding of being requires an analysis of Dasein, which is characterized not only by its existence, but also by its being in the world and its temporal existence. The concept of Dasein is central to the his argument, emphasizing that Dasein is always already situated in a world, and its understanding of being is shaped by its temporal existence. This perspective challenges traditional metaphysical notions of being as static and unchanging, proposing instead that being is fundamentally temporal and connected to human existence and understanding. As the title suggests, Heidegger sees the question of Being as indistinguishable from Time, arguing that Newtonian conceptions of time as a series of now-points are inadequate for understanding the being of Dasein. His Ontochronology argues that the existential and ontological analysis of Dasein reveals a more fundamental concept of time, one that is integral to the structure of Being itself. The text further elaborates on the idea of "thrownness" and several other existentialist themes. Thrownness is one of the three conditions that signifies Dasein's immersion in the world, where it finds itself already entangled in a web of relations and meanings. This "thrownness", combined with Dasein's inherent being-toward-death, underscores the existential condition of human beings, framing their existence as a continual engagement with their own finitude and the possibilities of their being. Heidegger posits that understanding the nature of being requires a fundamental rethinking of both being and time, dogmatically stating that the true nature of being can only be grasped through an understanding of the temporality that characterizes the existence of being.

One of the most influential voices in contemporary theology delivers “a deeply original, meticulously written” new approach to the way we think about God (Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography). In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a radical speculative theology that profoundly challenges classical understandings of the divine. God Being Nothing contests the conclusions of numerous orthodoxies through a probing question: How can thinking of God reach closure when the subjects of creation are themselves unfinished, when God’s self-revelation in history is ongoing, and when the active manifestation of God is still occurring? A renowned theologist and author of the landmark text Unfinished Man and the Imagination, Ray L. Hart now asks us to imagine God perpetually in process: an unfinished God being self-created from nothingness. Breaking away from the traditional focus on divine persons, Hart reimagines the Trinity in terms of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in order to reveal an ever-emerging Godhead who encompasses all of temporal creation and, within it, human existence. In Hart’s stunning vision, God’s continual generation from nothing manifests the full actualization of freedom: the freedom to create ex nihilo.

Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction 2022 — Shortlisted A neurotic party girl's coming-of-age memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die. Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can’t stay sober. She’s terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired. Then, in the autumn following her twenty-seventh birthday, an abnormal lump discovered in her left breast serves as the catalyst for a journey of rigorous self-questioning. Waiting on a diagnosis, she begins an intellectual assessment of her life, desperate to justify a short existence full of dumb choices. Armed with her philosophy degree and angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by and winds up writing a searingly honest memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A critically acclaimed, intimate and no-holds-barred memoir by Canada’s top defence lawyer, Nothing But the Truth weaves Marie Henein’s personal story with her strongly held views on society’s most pressing issues. Marie Henein, arguably the most prominent lawyer in the country, has written a memoir that is at once raw, beautiful, and altogether unforgettable. Her story, as an immigrant from a tight-knit Egyptian-Lebanese family, demonstrates the value of strong role models—from her mother and grandmother, to her brilliant uncle Sami who died of AIDS. She learned the value of hard work, being true to herself and others, and unapologetically owning it all. Marie Henein shares here her unvarnished view on the ethical and practical implications of being a criminal lawyer, and how the job is misunderstood and even demonized. Ironically, her most successful cases made her a “lightning rod” in some circles, confirming her belief that much of the public’s understanding of democracy and the justice system is based on popular culture and social media, and decidedly not the rule of law. As she turns fifty and struggles with the corrosive effect becoming invisible has on women, Marie doubles down on being even more highly visible and opinionated as she deconstructs, among other things, the otherness of the immigrant experience (Where are you really from?), the pros and cons of being a household name in this country, opening her own boutique law firm, and the commoditization of women’s previously unpaid labour popularized by the likes of Martha Stewart. Nothing But the Truth is refreshingly unconstrained and surprising—an account by a woman at the top of her game in a male-dominated world.