Being and Time Heidegger's "description of the world of phenomena" to be "fascinating, but maddeningly abstract". He suggests that much of "Being and Time" is a "description of a private spiritual journey" rather than genuine philosophy, and notes that Heidegger's assertions are unsupported by argument. Stephen Houlgate compares Heidegger's achievements in "Being and Time" to those of Kant in the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781) and Hegel in "The Phenomenology of Spirit" (1807) and "Science of Logic" (1812-1816). Simon Critchley calls the work Heidegger's "magnum opus", and writes that it is impossible to understand developments in continental philosophy after Heidegger without understanding it.
Being and Nothingness has been traditional with non-existential philosophers" and thereby remaining a Cartesian rationalist. Susan Sontag, writing in an essay in "The Supplement" to the "Columbia Spectator" that was later published in "Against Interpretation" (1966), praised Sartre's discussions of the body and concrete relations with others, identifying them as part of a French tradition of serious thought about problems of fundamental importance. John B. Vickery wrote that Sartre's work resembles Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890) in the way its author "merges psychology and the concrete sense of fiction", although he considered it less readable than Frazer's work. The philosopher