Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith

Taking an aspect of daily life in each chapter - getting out of bed, going to work - he explains key concepts in a way that is amusing and enlightening. The kicker for 'Breakfast with Socrates' is that it's just plain funny.' -The Christian Science Monitor, 'Rowland Smith supposes his reader is his social and intellectual equal who just happens not to have studied the discipline he did. ?The author is genuinely good at making connections between important ideas and lived experience, and successful in showing that philosophy can be a vehicle for making the trivialities of life more meaningful (and hence more bearable) than they otherwise might be.'Booklist?, 'What makes Smith's book genius isn't just the ability to lay out an interesting, eloquent, and relevant piece of work ? which he does. Neither breakfast, lunch, nor dinner will ever be the same again. With dry wit and marvelous invention, Smith draws on philosophy, literature, art, politics, and psychology to wake us up to a stunning range of ideas about how to live. Or take going to the gym: As you toil on the treadmill, is your panting a sign of virtue or of vice, of healthy exertion or of unhealthy narcissism? Working out is a version of what Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic - a kind of spiritual exercise, it also leads to worldly vanity. Start with waking up: What does it really mean to be awake? How do we know we're not still dreaming? Descartes argues that if you're able to doubt whether you're awake, you are at least thinking, and so you probably exist - no small achievement for first thing in the morning.

From waking up in the morning through traveling to work, shopping, eating, going to a party, falling asleep, and dreaming, Smith connects our most mundane habits to the wider world of ideas.

Former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith whisks you through an ordinary day with history's most extraordinary thinkers, explaining what they might have to say about your routine. Have breakfast with Socrates, go to work with Nietzsche, head to the gym with Foucault, then have sex with Ovid (or Simone de Beauvoir).

Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith