Being and Time raises the problem of "authenticity," that is, the potentiality or otherwise for mortal "Dasein" to exist "fully" enough that it might actually understand being. Heidegger is clear throughout the book that nothing makes certain that "Dasein" is capable of this understanding. Finally, this question of the authenticity of individual "Dasein" cannot be separated from the "historicality" of "Dasein". On the one hand, "Dasein", as mortal, is "stretched along" between birth and death, and thrown into its world, that is, thrown into its "possibilities", possibilities which "Dasein" is charged with the task of assuming. On the other hand, "Dasein's" access to
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 According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, "Being and Nothingness" had come to be seen as outdated by the time of Sartre's death in 1980, since, with its emphasis on consciousness, it seemed "tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and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