A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

by Alain de Botton (Profile, £8.99)

It was only after I had been philosopher- in-residence in the dentist's waiting room for a week that it struck me: people in dentists' waiting rooms think about different things. The receptionist is thinking about her nail varnish. The dentist is thinking about the new sports car all this drilling will enable him to purchase. And the patients are thinking about their aching teeth. In a hitherto totally unremarked way, the dentist's waiting room is a microcosm of society. I imagined the home life of a mother sitting opposite me with her screaming child, and nearly wept tears of pure philosophy. Here is a poignant photograph of an informational poster about gum health.

I put my theory of the dentist's waiting room – at once social microcosm and place of interminable transition – to an attractive young woman beside me who was holding the side of her face and wincing. When she did not reply, I embarked upon a lecture on stoicism. The woman scowled and told me to piss off. She was quite ordinary after all. I understood another massive truth: people are sad in dentists' waiting rooms because it is pointless to have your teeth fixed when you are going to die. Dentistry, I saw with my brain, encompasses the momentous themes of existence: food, pain and death. This is the devastating lesson that the dentist's waiting room, symbolic centre of our entire civilisation, has to teach us. (Dear British Dental Association: will this do?)

Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life

by Robert Rowland Smith (Profile, £12.99)

As with the airport and the dentist's waiting room, so with the gym, where one sees "bodies attempting to resist the fact that they are bodies – that is, natural entities bound one day to give up the ghost". Smith's book is structured around a day, interrogating activities such as waking up, commuting, going to the doctor, watching TV, or partying. His prose is troubled by an occasional tone of condescension ("lunch with your parents may have more meaning than you think"), and one's eye is often drawn to exactly those oppositions the author leaves unexamined – such as that between the "service industry" of consultants and so on, and "what's real". Still, the usual placid surface of such stuff is at least regularly disrupted by an engagement with the continental tradition, and there are enjoyable passages about some strange Japanese research on water and the rhetoric of romantic arguments. Oh, had you forgotten you were going to die? When you climb into a bath, consider its "coffin shape".

How to Be an Existentialist

by Gary Cox (Continuum, £12.99)

Jean-Paul Sartre, appearing in Smith's book only as someone who a) didn't take baths, coffin-shaped or otherwise, and b) was snide about waiters, gets the starring role here, in a book whose enthusiastic rigour perhaps indicates that more pop-philosophy authors ought to knuckle down with one big idea rather than trying to explain everything at once. There is some talking-down ("the ancient Greeks, guys like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle"); but once Cox forgets to try to be matey and funny all the time, the book evangelises eloquently for a slightly revised version of Sartrean existentialism, nicely explaining much-worried-about notions such as "authenticity" and "bad faith". Thus armed, one may face down absurdity and the inevitability of death in all those locations that irresistibly evoke them, such as airports, dentists' waiting rooms, gyms, dog kennels, and hot-air balloons.