SOURCE: McCabe, Mary Margaret. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Times Literary Supplement (23 June 2000): 14.

In the following negative review of The Consolations of Philosophy, McCabe argues that de Botton's attempt to make philosophy practical and more accessible fails.

Socrates' question, “How best to live?”, might easily be misunderstood. He could have been asking, not what is the best life, but how, given that the best life is what we want, we are to get it. We might equally misunderstand his answer, that the unexamined life is not worth living, as advice about the means—examination, or philosophy—to what is worth having. From here it is a short step to imagining that philosophy is a practical skill, designed to provide us with the good things in life.

And this short step is a disaster for philosophy, thrust thus into the competitive world of consequences, for which it is...