In Alain de Botton’s The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy, six “anx­i­eties of every­day life” are tack­led through the work of six philosophers—one for each chap­ter in the short book. A few years after pub­li­ca­tion the book was turned into a six-part doc­u­men­tary, Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness.

While both the book and the series aren’t rig­or­ous stud­ies of phi­los­o­phy, they are both extremely good intro­duc­tions to a part of each philosopher’s canon and how one could apply their the­o­ries to mod­ern life.

Lucas Can­tor has tracked down and embed­ded each of the six episodes of the doc­u­men­tary on his site but if, like me, you’re not a huge fan of embed­ded videos (espe­cially if there are mul­ti­ple), here they are sep­a­rately along with each episode’s synopsis:

Socrates on Self-Confidence (24:12). Why do so many peo­ple go along with the crowd and fail to stand up for what they truly believe? Partly because they are too eas­ily swayed by other people’s opin­ions and partly because they don’t know when to have con­fi­dence in their own. (Socrates)

Epi­cu­rus on Hap­pi­ness (23:58). British philoso­pher Alain De Bot­ton dis­cusses the per­sonal impli­ca­tions of the ancient Greek philoso­pher Epi­cu­rus (341-270BCE) who was no epi­curean glut­ton or wan­ton con­sumerist, but an advo­cate of “friends, free­dom and thought” as the path to happiness.

Seneca on Anger (24:13). Roman philoso­pher Lucious Annaeus Seneca (4BCE-65CE), the most famous and pop­u­lar philoso­pher of his day, took the sub­ject of anger seri­ously enough to ded­i­cate a whole book to the sub­ject. Seneca refused to see anger as an irra­tional out­burst over which we have no con­trol. Instead he saw it as a philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem and amenable to treat­ment by philo­soph­i­cal argu­ment. He thought anger arose from cer­tain ratio­nally held ideas about the world, and the prob­lem with these ideas is that they are far too opti­mistic. Cer­tain things are a pre­dictable fea­ture of life, and to get angry about them is to have unre­al­is­tic expectations.

Mon­taigne on Self-Esteem (24:09). This episode looks at the prob­lem of self-esteem from the per­spec­tive of Michel de Mon­taigne (16th Cen­tury), the French philoso­pher who sin­gled out three main rea­sons for feel­ing bad about one­self — sex­ual inad­e­quacy, fail­ure to live up to social norms, and intel­lec­tual infe­ri­or­ity — and then offered prac­ti­cal solu­tions for over­com­ing them.

Schopen­hauer on Love (24:05). Alain De Bot­ton sur­veys the 19th Cen­tury Ger­man thinker Arthur Schopen­hauer (1788–1860) who believed that love was the most impor­tant thing in life because of its pow­er­ful impulse towards ‘the will-to-life’.

Niet­zsche on Hard­ship (24:01). British philoso­pher Alain De Bot­ton explores Friedrich Niet­zsche’s (1844–1900) dic­tum that any worth­while achieve­ments in life come from the expe­ri­ence of over­com­ing hard­ship. For him, any exis­tence that is too com­fort­able is worth­less, as are the twin refugees of drink or religion.

You may also be inter­ested in Alain de Botton’s TED Talk: A kinder, gen­tler phi­los­o­phy of suc­cess.

Thanks and happy birth­day, Andy!