Contact RSA for event and ticket information.

This event has ended!

View current events hosted by RSA

RSA Thursday - Breakfast with Socrates: the philosophy of everyday life

Thursday, October 29, 2009 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM (GMT)

London, United Kingdom

Ticket Information

Type End     Quantity
Waiting list Ended Free  

Event Details

The unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates).
 
Only by examining our everyday lives and finding meaning in the ordinary, can we really learn what life's all about.

Robert Rowland Smith
grounds abstract ideas in the concrete experience of daily living, applying big thoughts to life's little challenges. From waking up (What does it really mean to be awake? What is consciousness? How do we know we exist?) to pounding the treadmill at the gym (a sign of virtue or of vice, of healthy exertion or unhealthy narcissism?) to shopping (Freudian therapy or, as Marx would have it, capitalist plot to enslave the masses?)

Join Robert Rowland Smith at the RSA for an eye-opening and mind-expanding journey through the day, in the company of some of the greatest figures in the history of ideas, from Descartes to Derrida. 

Speaker: Robert Rowland Smith, consultant, writer and lecturer on philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis, and author of Breakfast with Socrates (Profile Books, Oct 2009).

Chair: Matthew Taylor, RSA Chief Executive

Twitter logoSuggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsaphilosophy

Related RSA Projects


Find out more about the Connected Communities Project


Get the latest RSA Audio


Subscribe to RSA Audio iTunes Podcast iTunes | RSA Audio RSS Feed RSS

Speakers

When & Where


Durham House Street entrance
WC2N 6EZ London
United Kingdom

Thursday, October 29, 2009 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM (GMT)


  Add to my calendar

Hosted By

RSA



For more than 200 years, the RSA has provided platforms for leading public thinkers. That tradition lives on in our free events programme.

Our distinguished and diverse roll call of speakers has recently featured, amongst others, Kofi Annan, Wangari Maathai, Al Gore, Clay Shirky, Jeffrey Sachs and Craig Venter.