The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness ( 1943 ), gave way to a second period -- when the world was perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs -- of highly publicized political involvement.

Perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartre's philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojève's seminars, which continued for a number of years.

The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity ( mauvaise foi, literally, " bad faith ") and an " authentic " way of " being " became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L ' Être et le Néant ( Being and Nothingness ) ( 1943 ).

Many of the Absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman for Existentialism in Paris, but few Absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own Existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness, and many of the Absurdists had a complicated relationship with him.

" In as much as " essence " is a cornerstone of all metaphysical philosophy and the grounding of Rationalism, Sartre's statement was a repudiation of the philosophical system that had come before him ( and, in particular, that of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger ).

The novels were written largely in response to the events of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, and express certain significant shifts in Sartre's philosophical position towards ' engagement ' ( commitment ) in both life and literature, finding their resolution in the extended essay L ' existentialisme est un humanisme ( Existentialism is a Form of Humanism ), which was criticized from both sides of the existentialist fence.

Criticism of Sartre's novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side versus the novelistic and individual on the other.

Mattey, a philosopher rather than a novelist like Camus, flatly describes Nausea and others of Sartre's literary works as " practically philosophical treatises in literary form.

It traces Sartre's philosophical development in detail.

The existentialists include among their numbers important French authors who used fiction to convey their philosophical views ; these include Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea and play No Exit, and Albert Camus's The Stranger.

Hoping that his work would be picked up by Gallimard, the publishers of Jean-Paul Sartre's influential bestseller, Being and Nothingness ( 1943 ), he was perturbed when they rejected him, instead selecting Plon.

Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is ' A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology '.

His translation of Sartre's play Huis Clos (" No Exit "), directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award in 1943.

Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism ( 1946 ), originally presented as a lecture.

Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of the merciless pace of work ( and using drugs for this reason, i. e., amphetamine ) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert ( The Family Idiot ), both of which remained unfinished.

" Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major work of fiction was The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas.

Despite their similarities as polemicists, novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's literary work has been counterposed, often pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular imagination.

The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's Being and Nothingness is marked, but Heidegger felt that Sartre had misread his work, as he argued in later texts such as the " Letter on ' Humanism '.

In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Samuel Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome " absurdity "; as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame, Beckett's work focuses " on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a ' non-knower ' and as a ' non-can-er '.

In Sartre's seminal work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, it is shown how the essential dualism of Marx corresponds to a heightened synthesis, referring to totality, which is the monism that grounds the theses and antitheses of Marxism.

Britain became a fertile ground for the further development of the existential approach when R. D. Laing and David Cooper, often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, took Sartre's existential ideas as the basis for their work ( Laing, 1960, 1961 ; Cooper, 1967 ; Laing and Cooper, 1964 ).

Spade, Class Lecture Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

According to Derrida, Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian concerns is overly psychologistic, anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to Dasein in Being and Time.

Sartre's overriding concern in writing Being and Nothingness was to demonstrate that free will exists.

Sartre's essay is clearly influenced by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being.

* Class Lecture Notes on Sartre's Being and Nothingness by Professor Spade at Indiana University.

Sometimes he uses a synonym, such as Le Vomi ( Sartre's original, La Nausée ), and sometimes he uses a homonym, such as La Lettre et le Néon ( The Letter and Neon ), a pun on L ' Être et le Néant ( Being and Nothingness ).

The Concept of Mind has been compared to Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness by Iris Murdoch, who writes that English analytic philosophy shares the same general orientation as continental philosophy.

For example, the concept of the finite and infinite parts of the human self translate to the concepts of ' facticity ' and ' transcendence ' in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement.

According to Kołakowski, neither Sartre's view that freedom must be safeguarded in revolutionary organization nor his view that there will be perfect freedom when Communism has abolished shortages is new in a Marxist context, and Sartre fails to explain how either could have been brought about.

Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in The Age of Reason, which was completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the Second World War.

One of Baker's first acting jobs, in 1970, was a supporting role in a BBC adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy The Roads to Freedom.

It is Sartre's first novel and, in his opinion, one of his best works.

As a member of Jean-Paul Sartre's editorial committee for Les Temps modernes, Leiris was involved in a series of political struggles, including the Algerian War, and was one of the first to sign the Déclaration sur le droit à l ’ insoumission dans la guerre d ’ Algérie, the 1960 manifesto supporting the fight against the colonial forces in Algeria.

A prime example of the European tradition is Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, which is very different from the works of Popper, whose philosophy was for a time highly influential in the UK where he resided ( see below ).

Critique of Dialectical Reason was written in the wake of the rejection of Communism by leftist French intellectuals who also wanted to revive Marxism, a process that destroyed Sartre's friendship with Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Critique of Dialectical Reason is the product of a later stage in Sartre's thinking, during which he no longer identified Marxism with the Soviet Union or French Communism but came closer to identifying as a Marxist.

Leszek Kołakowski believes that the Critique of Dialectical Reason represents an abandonment of Sartre's original Existentialism, and depicts Marxism as " invincible ", something he finds absurd.

* Histoire et dialectique de la violence, Paris: Gallimard, 1973 ; History and the Dialectic of Violence: Analysis of Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979

also Sartre's Marxism Mark Poster, Pluto Press, London 1979, and Critique of Dialectical Reason

From an Orthodox Marxist perspective, the former is simple ignorance and or purposeful obfuscation of works such as Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and a broader literature which does in fact supply such specifications.