It has long been recognized that Sartre’s description of “being-in-itself” in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness (B&N) is reminiscent of Eleatic monism, the view traditionally attributed to Parmenides on which there is only one mind-independent entity, which is undifferentiated and atemporal. I reconstruct two arguments from premises Sartre endorses in B&N for Eleatic monism. These arguments are interesting not only because they give new life to an old reading of B&N, but also because there has recently been a revival of interest in monism in analytic metaphysics.

One argument for the moving spotlight theory is that it better explains our temporal phenomenology than does any static theory. In this paper it is argued that insofar as moving spotlight theorists take this to be a sound argument they ought embrace a new version of the moving spotlight theory according to which the moving spotlight is a cresting wave of causal efficacy. Hence a range of fundamental properties are temporary because presentness synchronically changesthe fundamental properties that are instantiated in the present moment, and our experiences of presentness co-varies with presentness, allowing us to phenomenologically detect presentness.