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 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