Oops! TV Has Swallowed Socrates ; Have You Been Dumped by Your Lover? Do You Suffer from Road Rage? the Great Philosophers Can Help, and Television Has Found a Way to Prove It, Says Alain De Botton, Presenter of a New Channel 4 Series

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I never wanted to be on TV. I never thought it would be possible. I have little hair, my head is strangely shaped, I have a weird name, people suspect I may be a French aristocrat. Yet two years ago, I bumped into a TV producer who asked me what I was working on. I told him it was a book of essays looking at how six great philosophers can help us over six common emotional problems (Socrates is good for unpopularity, Epicurus for poverty, Seneca for anger, Montaigne for inadequacy, Schopenhauer for love-sickness, Nietzsche for difficulties). With an enthusiasm untypical even among TV folk, he at once declared this to be a brilliant idea for a programme and promised that, if I so …