"Every day we follow a routine filled generally filled with the same day to day activities. Some of our routines vary from week to week and every once in a while we mix in other similarly mundane but less frequent activities. We have a passive acceptance of the behavior and mental state associated with these tasks, taking for granted the psychological possibilities that exist within each routine activity. From waking up, driving to work to going to lunch, on vacation or having sexual relations there are deeper meanings for our particular function in each of these seemingly mundane routine behaviors. It’s these deeper meanings that Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day seeks to explore and explain.
Author and former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith takes the reader into a worm hole of psychology, sociology and theology when explaining these aforementioned every day activities. With help from some artists, philosophers, poets and some of the other great minds throughout history, Smith sets out to show us the hidden meanings in our daily lives.
mith keeps it fairly free of the “shop-talk” that would turn off the average reader. Each chapter flows well for the most part, though Smith does have a tendency to ramble as if he’s a radio host with ADHD. Some of the sentences seem to drag a bit long to make a point, because several asides were made while coming to that conclusion. Mind you, the asides are coherent and relative to the overall subject of the chapter, but some prove to be a bit distracting and by the time they are finished you have to re-read to catch up your brain on what you may have missed. Thankfully, there is plenty of humor and lighthearted takes on popular culture and behavior that any strict philosophy is smoothed over and made easier to swallow.
Overall, Breakfast is a very thoughtful and continuously entertaining picture of human behavior. Smith adequately and expertly matches the right classical mind or system of thought with each chapter subject without making it seem like a stretch. Rooted deeply in philosophy and psychology, the book is never too complex or confusing that anyone with a normal level of reading comprehension would have a problem with. The theories and hypothesis presented are a great precursor to decision based analysis, presenting theory to preclude statistics that appear in such analysis."
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