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.
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 According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, "Being and Nothingness" had come to be seen as outdated by the time of Sartre's death in 1980, since, with its emphasis on consciousness, it seemed "tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and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