[Revised entry by Jack Reynolds and Pierre-Jean Renaudie on July 10, 2026.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. That lecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published two years earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist and Christian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”….

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