Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, recognized as a principal proponent of existentialism, a philosophical movement stressing individual freedom, responsibility, and the absurdity of existence absent inherent meaning.

Sartre's seminal philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), developed an ontology distinguishing between being-in-itself and being-for-itself, positing humans as condemned to freedom and prone to "bad faith" in evading authentic choice. He explored these themes in literary works such as the novel Nausea (1938), which depicts existential nausea arising from contingency, and the play No Exit (1944), famously concluding that "hell is other people." In 1946, his lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" defended the ethical implications of his atheism and emphasis on self-creation.