The incredibly popular House M.D. series does not fit into any genre, and its audience is so heterogeneous that it almost defies classification. Billed as a medical drama, it raises huge layers of various philosophical questions: the characters and situations created by intellectual screenwriters are so deep and meaningful that they allowed modern American philosophers to write 18 original essays collected in this book. In the character of Princeton-Plainsboro's chief cynic, they discover something of Sherlock Holmes, something of Socrates, something of Nietzsche's superman and a Taoist sage, and House turns out to be not at all such a bastard as he might at first seem.