Being and Time describes his project in the following way: "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of "being" and to do so concretely." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it on the basis that being is the most universal and emptiest concept, that is indefinable or obvious. Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings). "'Being' is not something like a being." Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." Heidegger is seeking
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 According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, "Being and Nothingness" had come to be seen as outdated by the time of Sartre's death in 1980, since, with its emphasis on consciousness, it seemed "tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and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