Name: Learning to Live
ISBN: 9781847672865

Luc Ferry

This book will make you change the way you think about philosophy. Instead of treating philosophy as a dry academic subject, Luc Ferry shows how it is essential to our everyday lives.

A User's Manual

Learning to Live

Gavin

Awful title, awful cover, but interesting. Another instance of the biggest trope in pop philosophy: 'reclaiming philosophy from the analysts'. (The problem with the trope is that two quite different things are sharing the name: roughly normative self-help and apriori, protoscientific conceptual analysis.)

Ferry is a compleat product of the elite École culture – Sorbonne, philosophy prof, did his time in office - but his insistence on clarity, even when talking about the likes of Bourdieu and Gadamer, and his rejection of their anti-humanism is free of hauteur. Try to imagine Jeremy Hunt or Betsy DeVos writing something this literary. 

(It makes Nietzsche out as more unavoidable than he is?)

Learning to Live A User's Manual