Being and Nothingness
The philosopher William Barrett 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 has been traditional with non-existential philosophers" and thereby remaining a Cartesian rationalist. The author Susan Sontag praised Sartre's discussions of the body and concrete relations with others. She identified them as part of a French tradition of serious thought about problems of fundamental importance. The literary scholar John B. Vickery wrote that "Being and Nothingness" resembles Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890) in the way its author "merges psychology and the concrete sense of fiction", although he considered it less readable than Frazer's work. The philosopher Iris Murdoch compared "Being and Nothingness" to Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" (1949). She maintained that continental philosophy shares the same general orientation as English analytic philosophy. According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, "Being and Nothingness" had come to be seen as outdated by Sartre's death in 1980, since its emphasis on consciousness associated with "the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest."