- Conference Speakers
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Alain de Botton
Acclaimed author, journalist, broadcaster and speaker, Alain de Botton’s works tackles questions of everyday life and refer both to his own experiences and ideas – and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers of the past. His work has been described as a ‘philosophy of everyday life.’
Relationships
He has written three books about relationships: Essays in Love (titled On Love in the US), The Romantic Movement and Kiss & Tell. In these works, de Botton attempted to define certain quasi-universal moments in romantic love. Though technically described as ‘novels,’ these books are perhaps more accurately defined as essays, for their focus is on ideas about love and relationships, rather than the telling of a story. The three books, the first of which was published when de Botton was twenty-three, earnt the author an international reputation and were bestsellers in many countries. De Botton remains interested in combining novelistic descriptions with more abstract discussion and plans to return to studies of emotional life in future books.
Popularisation
De Botton has also written two books that deal directly with the thoughts of other people: How Proust can change your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy. In these works, de Botton considered the works of Marcel Proust and six great Western philosophers (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), and drew out of them ideas he found of particular value. Though sometimes described as works of ‘popularisation,’ the books are in fact attempts to develop original ideas (about, for example, friendship, art, envy, desire and inadequacy) with the help of the thoughts of great past thinkers. Not least in their titles, the books allude playfully to the genre of the self-help book. While de Botton is ready to be caustic about most contemporary works of self-help, he is powerfully drawn to one central, almost naïvely grand idea which they neatly capture: that a book should in some way help us to live. This idea would have been familiar to writers like Seneca, Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld, disappearing only with the growing professionalisation of scholarship in the 19th century – and it is to this now often neglected tradition that de Botton is drawn.
Travel
Most recently, de Botton has written two books directly advancing his own philosophy of everyday life. In The Art of Travel, de Botton looked at themes in the psychology of travel: how we imagine places before we have seen them, how we remember beautiful things, what happens to us when we look at deserts, or stay in hotels or go to the countryside? The book was a mixture of intimate experiences and more abstract reflections.
Status Anxiety
In his book, Status Anxiety, de Botton looked at an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. He defined this, for the first time, as ‘status anxiety’ – and considered both the causes of, and possible consolations for, this condition.
The Architecture of Happiness
His latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, is the fruition of years of thinking about buildings, both good and bad and focuses on the question of visual beauty. Much of the book was written at home in West London, just near Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, one of the uglier man-made places, which nevertheless helpfully provided him with a vivid example of just how important it is to get architecture right.
Television Documentaries
De Botton has long been involved in making television documentaries based on his work. How Proust can change your Life was turned into a BBC film starring Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Kendal. De Botton subsequently wrote and presented television series based on The Consolations of Philosophy, Status Anxiety and Architecture. These were originally made for Channel 4 in the UK and then shown on many stations around the world.
Awards
De Botton’s works have been bestsellers – selling in the many hundreds of thousands in many different territories over the last eleven years. In February 2003, de Botton was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, one of the France's highest artistic honours. In November of the same year, he was awarded the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon, whose previous recipients include Tzvetan Todorov, Roberto Calasso, Timothy Garton Ash and Jean Starobinski. In 2004, his book Status Anxiety was awarded the prize for the 'Economics Book of the Year' by the Financial Times, Germany.
