Being and Nothingness was "a pretentious metaphysical thesis" and "principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'." The philosopher William Barrett, writing in "Irrational Man" (1958), described "Being and Nothingness" as "a great, uneven, brilliant and verbose tome". He noted Sartre's debts to Heidegger, but nevertheless credited him with originality. He criticized Sartre for neglecting Heidegger's "notion of the truth of Being", his understanding of what it means for a subject or object to be. In his view, Sartre failed to "deal with the problem of truth in a radical and existential way", instead viewing truth in "the ordinary intellectualistic sense that
Being and Nothingness Iris Murdoch, writing that continental philosophy shares the same general orientation as English analytic philosophy, compared Sartre's work to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" (1949). According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, "Being and Nothingness" had come to be seen as outdated by the time of Sartre's death in 1980, since, with its emphasis on consciousness, it seemed "tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest." The philosopher David Pears, writing in the anthology "Philosophical essays on Freud" (1982), criticized Sartre's critique of Freud, describing it as complex but