Stephen Trombley has mined two and a half millennia of Western thought for observations that reflect the seriousness, the joy and the strangeness of human existence. Via thirty-nine eclectic themes, he journeys across the history of philosophy, from ancient Greeks to contemporary continentals, from idealists to existentialists and from empiricists to analytics. Descartes on dogs, Aquinas on backbiting, Montaigne on bees, Kierkegaard on exercise.