ABSTRACT
In the history of Western philosophy, the notion of nothingness or non-being has been excluded from the core of its thematic reflections since the very beginning by Parmenides. By introducing nothingness or non-being into the understanding of being, Plato, through the mouth of the Stranger, shows that he is not a naive thinker of identity. Plato's brief excursion into the discussion of nothingness in Sophist shows that nothingness can be thought and spoken of in different ways: the logical-epistemological, the ontological, and the ethical. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that our language use shows that reader have experience of nothingness, and thus nothingness is some kind of being, but in a different modality. The tradition of Western philosophy, by paying attention merely to beings or to Being, is unable to understand the intuitive experience of nothingness. Sartre’s understanding of consciousness as nothingness develops Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality of consciousness into a philosophy of difference.
