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 of metaphysics which denies or refuses grace inevitably ends by setting up in front of us the image of an atrophied and contradictory world where the better part of ourselves is finally unable to recognise itself." The philosopher Jean Wahl criticized Sartre's arguments about the topic of "nothing". The philosopher Frederick Copleston, writing in "A History of Philosophy" (1946–1986), described Sartre's view that all human actions are the result of free choice as "highly implausible", though he noted that Sartre had ways of defending his position. The British philosopher A.J. Ayer said that, apart from some psychological insights, the book