Breakfast With Socrates

Robert Rowland Smith was for ten years a Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and is a consultant, lecturer and writer on philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. He is a frequent contributor to the Independent and the Philosophy Bites podcast series, and features regularly on the radio discussing philosophy and our everyday lives.

Philosophy made accessible and applied to the quotidian...manages to be funny without underestimating the reader. Financial Times Smith's book is structured around a day, interrogating activities such as waking up, commuting, going to the doctor, watching TV, or partying. The Guardian it's hard not to recommend someone who provides you with an argument for not going to the gym, for promoting the power of using the TV remote control and letting your parents pay for lunch! -- Sue Magee Bookbag The ancient philosophers - and the author - bring meaning to your day...What has philosophy to do with work? What could Kant's transcendentalism, Hegel's dialectic or even Marx's materialism have to say about the daily grind? Well, this book demonstrates that the wisdom of the sages reveals much. Management Today Smith has written a remarkable book, which goes through the seemingly mundane events of a day - waking up, having a bath, commuting, reading a book, and so on - and explores them with a philosophical eye to see what insights might be gleaned...joyously wise. Church Times Breakfast with Socrates takes us on an extraordinary philosophical tour of an ordinary day as we wake up with Descartes' awareness of our own consciousness, go off to work with Weber's self-denial, play hooky with John Stuart Mill's passion for individual liberty, and end the day in a nice, warm bath with the Buddha's heightened consciousness of the moment. Who said philosophers aren't practical? -- Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar and Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates