There was a time, about the middle of the twentieth century, when it was widely assumed that existentialism was destined to determine the presuppositions and concerns of any future philosophy. Such claims now appear so absurdly and so obviously overstated that it is hard to imagine they could have been stated so seriously by so many weighty pundits. None the less, it would be no less short-sighted of us to swing to the opposite extreme and to dismiss existentialism as a mere fashion of the 1940s and 1950s, something that went with a taste for Gauloises and black roll-neck jumpers.