Numerous people contributed to this work directly or indirectly. As always, my family comes first. Thanks to Marcia, Vittoria, Angelo, and Alicia for their ongoing support, enthusiasm, and love. My greatest accomplishment in life is to be a member of a family whose talents and virtues far exceed my own.
Thanks also to Alice Hodge, an expert of book formatting who corrected my numerous errors and prepared the final manuscript with peerless efficiency and grace. Finally, I thank the following publishers for their permission to adapt material from a previously published journal article and for allowing me to reprint short excerpts from one of my books:
What is the Meaning of Human Life? (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi Editions, 2001).
“Shakespeare and The Absurd,” in The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy, edited by Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne (London: Routledge Publishing, 2018).