Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, irony, and often brutal violence, the Coens have crafted a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic Hollyood yet maintains a distinctly postmodern feel. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers investigates philosophical themes in the works of these filmmakers and also uses their movies as vehicles to explore fundamental concepts of philosophy. The contributing authors discuss concepts such as justice, the problem of interpretation, existential role-playing, the philosophy of comedy, and the coldness of modernity.

"The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers...makes a convincing case for reading their films within a wide array of philosophic contexts and persuasively demonstrates that the films of the Coen brothers often implicitly and sometimes explicitly engage with central issues in the history of western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Baudrillard, and MacIntyre." Michael Valdez Moses, author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture.