Breakfast With Socrates

Curtis Silver in Wired:

ScreenHunter_02 Mar. 20 12.35 Every day we follow a routine filled generally filled with the same day to day activities. Some of our routines vary from week to week and every once in a while we mix in other similarly mundane but less frequent activities. We have a passive acceptance of the behavior and mental state associated with these tasks, taking for granted the psychological possibilities that exist within each routine activity. From waking up, driving to work to going to lunch, on vacation or having sexual relations there are deeper meanings for our particular function in each of these seemingly mundane routine behaviors. It’s these deeper meanings that Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day seeks to explore and explain.

Author and former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith takes the reader into a worm hole of psychology, sociology and theology when explaining these aforementioned every day activities. With help from some artists, philosophers, poets and some of the other great minds throughout history, Smith sets out to show us the hidden meanings in our daily lives.

For example, in reading Breakfast one of the most stunning revelations was how deeply rooted in psychology a simple act of taking your parents out to lunch actually is.

More here.