Why this focus on death and nothingness?

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus once wrote: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

The answer given by the existentialists is that life is very much worth living.

But whatever worth and meaning it has is a result of our own free choices about how to live our lives.

Such choices are made in the full knowledge that we are essentially finite creatures.

 We are doomed to annihilation in a universe that is itself intrinsically meaningless.

For Sartre, the most famous existentialist of them all, freedom is essentially bound up with consciousness and consciousness is being-for-itself, a nothingness that must be sharply distinguished from being-in-itself.

Cox does a good job of explaining these abstruse ideas in language accessible to non-philosophers.

He intersperses his exposition of thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Kierkegaard with illustrations from the likes of Sister Sledge, The Doors and Woody Allen.

In so doing he relates the abstract concepts of existentialist phenomenology - anxiety, authenticity, bad faith and facticity - to questions about childhood, marriage, sexual desire, God and death.

One minor criticism is that no space at all is given to the idea of political engagement.

Sartre, for example, was a committed Marxist, and politically active for much of his adult life.

This was not just an incidental biographical fact. It was closely bound up with his philosophical outlook.

 After all, Marxism and phenomenology share a common root in the philosophy of Hegel.

Overall, though, Cox has produced a fine book that can be highly recommended.