Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life's Milestones

Learn to ride a bicycle with Einstein, have your first kiss with Kant, get your first job with Adam Smith, and weather midlife with Dante. Let historys greatest minds illuminate lifes turning points. In Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith brought the power of philosophy down to earth by proving, in a very engaging and entertaining way, that human moments meet big ideas on a regular basis. Now Smith offers the natural offspring of that book, expanding the day in a life concept to life as a whole in Driving with Plato . Start with being born. For some, like Sartre, you get off to a bad start: You didnt ask to be born, and theres little point to it anyway, as life is meaningless. And yet for Martin Heidegger, if you hadnt been born, youd have no sense of your own being, and that would be a tragic loss. How about midlife crisis? When Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, he deliberately set his story of spiritual transformation at the halfway point of his life. Nietzsche, too, in his autobiography, spoke of burying his forty-fifth year as he went on to yet higher forms of actualization as a self-styled superman. Drawing on the great philosophers, as well as on literature, art, politics, and psychology, Smith creates the richest possible range of ideas for readers to contemplate, all in a warm, humorous voice that revels both in lifes absurdities and in the pure delight of discovery. Grounding abstract ideas in concrete experience, Driving with Plato helps us think more deeply about the key events in our lives even as it provides a philosophical education that everyone can appreciate and enjoy.

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