Name: The consolations of philosophy
ISBN: 9780786167371

The consolations of philosophy

A good introduction to philosophy and the great philosophers for young people, with a short biographical note, and an analysis of how they approached the major issues of life. Chapter headings include Unpopularity, Not Having Enough Money, Frustration, Inadequacy, Broken Heart and Difficulties.The book is well annotated and lavishly illustrated. Partly a review of philosophy from Socrates to Nietzsche, and partly a self-help book.

What Hacker News says

dangitnotagainJul 2023

Once while looking for ‘On the consolation of Philosophy’, by Boethius I came across the near title ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’ by Alain de Botton.

After having self studied philosophy for over a decade, Botton’s dash review of great thinkers is accessible and refreshing. Boethius is not for the newb.

Find personalities, or eras, or thought topics which appeal to you and read everything you can of that vein.

The old stuff seems cringe today, though many great thinkers speak in a timeless language. Some tellings and narratives mar these often reclusive legends. One must struggle to find authentic and revealing accounts where their original language is not available to you.

Audiobooks and long drives (or workouts) are a worthy competitor of books.

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throwawaylove12Mar 2023

I've been suicidal. Some things that helped me:

1. Reading ancient philosophers. I like Alain de Botton's book The Consolations of Philosophy as a start. He covers different types of philosophers throughout history and then you can pick the type that resonates and follow that rabbit hole.

2. Understanding/confronting childhood trauma.

3. Figuring out what I wanted to do, i.e. long-term meaning/purpose, and creating an action plan. The plan didn't even end up working out, but simply working on it somehow scratched some deep itches.

4. Trying out a different diet. Maybe environmental toxins, too. I know those sound trivial but... Garbage In Garbage Out.

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earthboundkidJun 2022

Being self-caused and being a causeless cause aren't very different, and I think for the most part one can ignore whatever theoretical differences exist between them, because nothing in ordinary experience is either self-caused or causeless, so either way, we're positing something extraordinary as the cause of ordinary existence.

However I suspect self-causation is the wrong way to look at it. In the case of Python metaclasses and such, the self-referentiality is created by a pointer. The metaclass doesn't actually contain itself; it contains a pointer to itself (Python makes this a little obscure, but all objects in Python are really pointers to C structs). To be self-causing though isn't like following a pointer. The relevant operation is not following the reference back to the cause, the relevant operation is _causing_. You can sort of get around it with time travel, but then the thing isn't causing itself, strictly. Rather thing from T2 is causing thing at T1.

(In fact, Buddhist analysis of causation is very good on just this point: when we really look closely at causation, we find that all causing must be self-discharging and immediate, which means all things are empty of inherent existence. You can get back to monotheism, as some flavors of Buddhism do, by positing this ground of causation as Buddha Nature.)

>such a cause must be infinitely good

This is a mathematically proven fact, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_ontological_proof

In general, I recommend Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy as a good primer on Neoplatonism and why the One and the Good must be identical.

>Atheism is older than religion.

No, not believing in specific gods is older than religion. Atheism is a specific doctrine that originates in the eighteenth century as part of a garbled transmission of Confucianism to the West and newfound scientific interest in materialism. To be an atheist isn't to say Zeus or Odin or Yahweh don't exist. You can be extremely religious and deny the existence of any named god! Indeed, that is the height of piety, to humbly submit that you don't and can't know God's name. To be an atheist is to say that the Good as such doesn't exist and the world is fundamentally physical. (However, there's no good definition of physicalism that doesn't lapse into circularity or absurdities…) There are very few true atheists. To really be an atheist, to use Lacanian terminology, is to not believe in any Big Other, but doing that requires an unusual degree of vigilance. Everyone is always letting in some Big Other, but saying that their Big Other isn't like the other Big Others.

The problem of evil is just that problem that whatever good it is that God is interested in and whatever good it is that we are interested in must be different goods. But of course this is so. Why wouldn't it be? The question (again, getting back to Daoism) is whether our good is subsumable under God's good, or whether to exist as ourselves we must tragically oppose whatever it is that God's goodness is and so ultimately perish.

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statquontrarianDec 2020

For introductions, my favorite is Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy.

It's a fascinating subject but be prepared to be utterly confused the deeper you dive. I've concluded, like philosopher Michael Huemer, that few philosophical principles can be uncontroversially concluded. Excerpt from The Problem of Political Authority [1]:

"Questions of this kind are notoriously difficult. How should we approach them? One approach would be to start from some comprehensive moral theory–say, utilitarianism or Kantian deontology–and attempt to deduce the appropriate conclusions about political rights and obligations. I, unfortunately, cannot do this. I do not know the correct general moral theory, and I don’t think anyone else does either. The reasons for my skepticism are difficult to communicate, but they derive from reflection on the problems of moral philosophy and on the complex, confusing, and constantly disputed literature about those problems. It is a literature in which one theory after another runs into a morass of puzzles and problems that becomes ever more complicated as more philosophers work on it. I cannot fully communicate the situation here; the best way of appreciating my skepticism about moral theory is to delve into that literature yourself. Here, I shall simply announce that I will not assume any comprehensive moral theory, and I think we should be very skeptical of any attempt to arrive at sound conclusions in political philosophy by starting from such a theory. Nor, for similar reasons, do I start by assuming any general political theory, though we shall arrive at a political theory in the end."

As far as an overarching philosophy, I've concluded on intuitionism, closely approximated by Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism [2].

[1] https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/1.htm [2] Excerpt: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/5.htm

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robtherobberNov 2020

Books

Alain de Botton - The Consolations of Philosophy: https://indefenseofbatman.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/alain_...

Web articles

Maria Popova - 13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/10/23/13-learnings-13-yea...

Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-ver...

Bertrand Russell - In praise of idleness: https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/368/368RussellIdlenesst...

Videos

Bluebird by Charles Bukowski (read by Tom O'Bedlam): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVdpfhsj6uI