Alain De Botton

Swiss-born British essayist Alain de Botton is best known for his efforts to bring philosophy to a broader audience. His books engage the intersection between great European thinkers and the problems of work, love, and leisure that dominate contemporary people’s everyday lives—in his words, de Botton wants to offer “a philosophy of everyday life” that aims to “bring elite culture into the wider culture.” He moved to England at a young age and attended boarding school in Oxford before studying History at Cambridge University and Philosophy at King’s College in London. He quit his PhD program in Philosophy at Harvard to write for a popular audience and has since published 15 books of both fiction and nonfiction. His essays cover a wide variety of topics, but particularly emphasize love and relationships. He has also founded the School of Life, an international organization that seeks to teach emotional intelligence through nontraditional classes, therapy sessions, and a video series on YouTube. De Botton’s work has polarized critics since he first published the novel Essays in Love in 1993. Many have considered his books important efforts to connect the public with the world of academic philosophy, which delves deeply into essential questions about human existence and happiness but remains too esoteric and complex for a general audience. Many philosophers, however, have criticized de Botton’s work as pompous and condescending, prone to stating the obvious and bastardizing central figures of the Western literary and philosophical canon by oversimplifying their work in an attempt to convince a reader whose intelligence he underestimates. Nevertheless, De Botton claims to write for the “bright but impatient” reader and remains critical of the academic establishment, which he believes betrays the philosophers and writers it studies by treating them as incorruptible idols from the past rather than valuable sources of information about how to live better in the present.