The Consolations of Philosophy

Unpopular with your peers? Struggling with money? Frustrated that the world doesn’t work the way it should? Recovering from a broken heart? Feeling inadequate? Worried about difficulties ahead? Alain de Botton has good news: the greatest philosophers in history have been exactly where you are — and they had things to say about it that are still, two thousand years later, directly and immediately useful.

The Consolations of Philosophy applies six great thinkers — Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche — to six specific and entirely modern sources of unhappiness. De Botton’s genius is his ability to make philosophy feel like a practical tool rather than an academic discipline — to show that the questions these thinkers were wrestling with are exactly the questions we ask ourselves in our most difficult moments.

Witty, beautifully written, illustrated with paintings and photographs, and genuinely enriching — this is the book that proves philosophy is not for academics alone. It is for anyone who is alive and struggling to understand why. One of the great works of popular philosophy of the last fifty years. Published by Penguin.