Julian Baggini - Life

Julian Bagginis books include A Short History of Truth, How the World Thinks, Freedom Regained, The Ego Trick, Whats It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life and the best-selling The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten. He has written for numerous newspapers and magazines, as well as for the think tanks The Institute of Public Policy Research, Demos and Counterpoint. He was the co-founder of The Philosophers Magazine.

Antonia Macaro is an existential psychotherapist, author of More than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age, Reason, Virtue and Psychotherapy and co-author of The Shrink and the Sage. She has many years clinical experience in the field of addictive behaviours. Antonia has a degree in Oriental Studies and an MA in Philosophy, and was part of the UKs philosophical counselling movement from its early days.

Also by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro

The Shrink and the Sage: A Guide to Living

Also by Julian Baggini

How The World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World

Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will

The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think

The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean to be You?

Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover?: 100 Fresh Takes on Familiar Sayings and Quotations

Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests

Do They Think Youre Stupid?: 100 Ways of Spotting Spin and Nonsense from the Media, Pundits and Politicians

Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind

The Pig That Wants to be Eaten: And 99 Other Thought Experiments

Whats It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life

Making Sense: Philosophy Behind the Headlines

Atheism: A Very Short Introduction

Also by Antonia Macaro

Reason, Virtue and Psychotherapy

More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age

Life doesnt come with an instruction manual, so the old saying goes, and with good reason. The makers of phones, chairs, souffls and other created objects have a clear idea of what kinds of things these are, what function they serve and how they should be made or used. And they can draw on all this knowledge to create manuals for users.

Its different for human beings. We were not created with a predetermined purpose. We find ourselves thrown into the world, to use Heideggers evocative expression. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, for human beings, Existence precedes essence. We are, before we know what exactly we are and how we ought to live. We have to work out our purpose for ourselves: its not a given.

There is, however, one kind of users manual we can resort to, one that requires a small but significant change in punctuation. Strictly speaking, it is a users manual a manual for users written by users. These user-authors are the philosophers who have been grappling with the human condition for millennia, from the ancient worlds of China, India and Greece to the present day.

The words of dead philosophers speak to us across the centuries because human beings have a great deal in common with each other. There are universal human needs and common life situations. Each person, like a snowflake, is unique, just like every situation and every society is different. But we can draw on what we know about humanity more generally to illuminate particular cases.

Of course many believe we are created with a purpose by a designer God who gave us an instruction manual in the form of the sacred texts of their religion. Even they, however, would surely accept that they can learn from other traditions of thought and that the worlds great philosophers have a great deal to offer.

This manual is a compendium of their wisdom. Unlike traditional philosophy reference books, it is not organised by the names of philosophers, schools or abstract concepts but by life situations. When people face problems in life they do not go looking for what the great thinkers have said about deontological duties, a priori principles or the difference between substance and attribute (even though all of these might actually be of use to them) they want to know what philosophers have to say about relationships, work, illness, despair.

The relevance of philosophy to these questions has varied. For the ancient schools, questions of how to live were central. Most modern philosophers, in contrast, have had little or nothing to say about the art of living. However, in the last couple of decades or so, philosophys public image seems to have changed from impenetrable scholasticism to something that could be useful to everyone. Stoicism in particular has grown enormously in popularity, and with its wealth of practical advice on how to live, it is easy to understand why. The Stoics excel in perceptiveness and clarity, and many of their words feature in these pages.

Many who have helped to create this shift have argued that it marks a return to philosophys historic mission and that ancient philosophy was a form of psychotherapy. Supporting evidence includes the fact that both Albert Ellis, founder of rational-emotive behaviour therapy, and Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive behavioural therapy, were influenced by Stoicism. In particular, they acknowledge a debt to Epictetus saying that People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things. The idea is that how we think affects how we feel, so we can change our feelings by changing our thinking.

According to Richard Sorabji, the idea of philosophy as therapy can be traced back to the fifth century BCE , when Democritus said, Medicine cures diseases of the body, wisdom frees the soul from emotions. This view seems to have been retained by the later Stoics, Sceptics and Epicureans. Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any [human] suffering, wrote Epicurus. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind. Stoic philosophers also clearly stated that philosophy should be seen as a medical art for the soul.

But the relationship between philosophy and therapy is not as clear-cut as it might seem. Apart from the point, already made, that some philosophical schools are much more relevant to daily life than others, there is also the issue that meanings can be lost over the eras, as well as in translation. When the ancients spoke of therapy, they did not mean exactly the same as we do. In particular, they did not believe that studying philosophy was a technique for feeling better. They thought that through philosophy we could come to see things more clearly and, most importantly, more truthfully. We would be cured of the false beliefs and values that cause suffering, like attachment to the things of the world. This