How to Think Like a Philosopher: Scholars, Dreamers and Sages Who Can Teach Us How to Live – Cave Peter (2024)

An entertaining guide to history's most fascinating philosophers - from Sappho to Kant, and Aristotle to Simone de Beauvoir - which seeks to help us answer life's big questions. In showing how the great philosophers of human history lived and thought - and what they thought about - Peter Cave provides an accessible and enjoyable introduction to thinking philosophically and how it can change our everyday lives. He addresses questions such as: Is there anything 'out there' that gives meaning to our lives? Does reality tell us how we ought to live? What indeed is reality and what is appearance - and how can we tell the difference? This book paints vivid portraits of an assortment of inspiring thinkers: from Lao Tzu to Avicenna to Iris Murdoch; from Hannah Arendt to Socrates and Plato to Karl Marx; from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Sartre to Samuel Beckett - and let us not forget Lewis Carroll for some thought-provoking fantasies and Ludwig Wittgenstein for the anguishes of a genius. As well as displaying optimists and pessimists, believers and non-believers, the book displays relevance to current affairs, from free speech to abortion to the treatment of animals to our leaders'…