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.
Nikolas Kompridis University, Kompridis worked with the influential philosopher and Frankfurt School social theorist Jürgen Habermas while a post-doctoral fellow at Goethe University. Following his time with Habermas he wrote a book responding to what he saw as serious shortcomings and inconsistencies in his mentor's work. In "Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future", Kompridis argues that Habermasian critical theory, which has in recent decades become the main paradigm of that tradition, has largely severed its own roots in German Idealism, while neglecting modernity's distinctive relationship to time and the utopian potential of critique. While drawing on many of Habermas'