Nothingness and Emptiness ― A Buddhist Engagement With the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre

Laycock (philosophy, University of Toledo) seeks to resolve the incoherence implicit in the Sartean conception of nothingness by opening it to a Buddhist vision of emptiness. Rooted in the Madhyamika dialectic and an articulated meditative (zen) phenomenology, the book examines the assumptions that sustain Sartre's early phenomenological ontology and questions his theoretical elaboration of consciousness as "nothingness." Laycock argues that, in addition to the "relative" nothingness (the for-itself) defined against the positivity and plenitude of the in-itself, Sartre's view requires, but repudiates, an "absolute" nothingness which Buddhism supplies in the form of "emptiness". Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Steven W. Laycock is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo and the author of Mind as Mirror and the Mirroring of Mind: Buddhist Reflections on Western Phenomenology, coeditor (with James G. Hart) of Essays in Phenomenological Theology, also published by SUNY Press, and author of Foundations for a Phenomenological Theology.