Alain de Botton - Big Ideas for Curious Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy

Published in 2018 by The School of Life
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ISBN 978-1-912891-76-4

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Know Yourself
with Socrates

Learn to Say Whats on Your Mind
with Ludwig Wittgenstein

Its Hard to Know What We Really Want
with Simone de Beauvoir

When Someone Is Angry, Maybe Its Not You Who Is Responsible
with Ibn Sina

People Are Unhappy, Not Mean
with Zera Yacob

Dont Expect Too Much
with Seneca

Maybe You Are Just Tired
with Matsuo Basho

What Is Normal Isnt Normal
with Albert Camus

No One Knows
with Ren Descartes

Politeness Matters
with Confucius

Why We Procrastinate
with Hypatia of Alexandria

Why Its Hard to Know What You Want to Do with Your Life
with Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Good Things Are (Unexpectedly) Hard
with Friedrich Nietzsche

Weakness of Strength Theory
with Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kintsugi
with Buddha

The Need to Teach Rather than Nag
with Immanuel Kant

The Mind-Body Problem
with Jean-Paul Sartre

Why You Feel Lonely
with Michel de Montaigne

The Meaning of Life
with Aristotle

Why We Hate Cheap Things
with Mary Wollstonecraft

The News Doesnt Always Tell The Whole Story
with Jacques Derrida

Art Is Advertising for What We Really Need
with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Why Do Some People Get Paid More than Others?
with Adam Smith

Whats Fair?
with John Rawls

Shyness: How to Overcome It
with Maimonides

Why Grown-up Life Is Hard
with... Philosophy

Philosophy is quite a mysterious subject that most people dont know anything about. The average school doesnt teach it, the average adult does not understand it, and the whole subject can seem odd and kind of unnecessary. Thats a real pity, because, in fact, philosophy has a lot to teach everyone, whatever their age. It might even be the most important subject you will ever study. This book wants to open the door for youto show you what philosophy is all about, and how it can help you to understand life.

The word philosophy itself gives us a bit of a clue as to why the subject matters. Its originally a word from Ancient Greek: the first part, philo, means love (philately means the love of stamps). The second part, which comes from the word sophia, means wisdom. So, when you put the two parts togetherphilo-sophyit literally means the love of wisdom.

Philosophy helps us to live wise lives. But what does wisdom mean? Its not very obvious, at first. Is being wise just about being clever? No, its much more than that. Its about being sensible, kind, calm and accepting of how life can sometimes be (which isnt always perfect, and sometimes really quite hard).

To get a better idea of what wisdom might involve, we can think about its opposite: not being wise. Imagine that your mum loses her keys. There are unwise ways she might deal with this. Maybe she starts shouting at other people: Who moved my car keys? (even though probably no one did move them). Or maybe she gets into a panic and throws herself onto the sofa, moaning that shes a complete idiot and that her entire life is ruined. Poor mum!

What would a wiser mum do? Instead of ranting and raving, or starting to panic straight away, she would think: Well, car keys do tend to get lost from time to time. I must have put them somewhere maybe theyre in the coat I was wearing yesterday. She could ask (calmly) if you had seen them, and she might even laugh about how silly she was to forget where shed put them.

There are lots of situations where you can see the difference between unwise and wise ways of dealing with stuff that happens. There are lots of problems, both big and small, in everyones lifeincluding yours, too, of course. We can never get rid of them entirely (though we try hard), but we can all get better at how we deal with our problems.

We can try not to get angry so often, try to shout less, and try not to panic or hurt the people we love. Philosophy tries to help us act more wisely when facing the problems in our lives that we cant do much about.