Breakfast with Socrates: the philosophy of everyday life takes you through an ordinary day in the company of some extraordinary ideas. From waking up in the morning, through going to work, shopping, visiting the gym, going to a party, having sex, falling back to sleep and dreaming, it provides an hour-by-hour commentary on what you are up to, drawn from the history of ideas.

Start with waking up: What does it really mean to be awake? How do we know we’re not still dreaming? Descartes argues that if you’re able to doubt whether you’re awake, you are at least thinking, and so you probably exist – no small achievement for first thing in the morning. Or take going to the gym: What is the philosophy of sweat? As you toil on the treadmill, is your panting a sign of virtue or of vice, of healthy exertion or unhealthy narcissism? Working out is a version of what Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic, a kind of spiritual exercise, but it also leads to worldly vanity.

How about shopping? We’ve got used to the idea of shopping as ‘retail therapy’, but what about it is therapeutic exactly? Freud – who invented therapy - would say shopping is like being a child again and receiving gifts from your parents; what shopping does is artificially recreate the sense that you deserve the love of mummy and daddy. Yet for the followers of Karl Marx, shopping is part of a capitalist plot – keep people shopping and you stop them thinking, making them docile and easy to manipulate, like laboratory mice.

As the day unfolds, Breakfast with Socrates gives you an informal introduction to the history of ideas, applying big thoughts to life’s little challenges, and in many cases offering the first ever conceptual treatment of a subject (bunking off, for example). That means not just covering off the basic arguments of philosophy, but drawing on literature, art, politics and psychology, to find the best possible example and create the richest possible range of ideas for the reader to engage with: more than a York-Notes-meets-Self-Help guidebook, the book provides all you need to reflect on life as it is lived. And in addition to the windows it opens onto established thinkers, each chapter also supplies original insights of its own: the chapter on getting ready in the morning, for example, shows how you can never be 100% prepared – because the world is fundamentally unpredictable - and why that is a good thing.

Because it grounds abstract ideas in concrete experience, Breakfast with Socrates helps you think a little deeper about what you’re doing at any point in the day.

Watch a clip of Robert talking about the book. If you’re interested in design, you can have a look at the cover designs for the international editions.