" "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...

Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason" ranks with "Being and Nothingness" as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the "Critique" to its deserved place among Sartre's works and within philosophical discourse as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano...