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
Robert Zimmer (philosopher) Robert Zimmer (philosopher) Robert Zimmer (born October 25, 1953 in Trier, Germany) is a German philosopher and essayist who writes biographies and popular introductions to philosophy and to the history of philosophy. Robert Zimmer was educated at the German universities of Saarbrücken and Düsseldorf and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Edmund Burke. From 1986 - 2013 he lived as a freelance writer and publicist in Berlin. In 2013 he moved to Stuttgart. His most popular book so far has been “Das Philosophenportal”, a collection of 16 essays on 16 different classical works of philosophy, which has been translated into more