The title is misleading. This book is not a collection of self-help recipes gleaned from the wisdom of philosophers. McGirr does not favour individualistic conceptions of healing. Philosophy, he says, is about finding a well for the village from which everyone can draw sustenance. Nor is the book a compendium of philosophers’ views about the good life. Philosophy, as McGirr understands it, is an activity that intersects with life. It is found in every culture, and anyone can do it. He finds inspiration in his encounters with homeless people and inhabitants of African slums, and in his interactions with students. But his primary purpose is to show how a personal search for meaning and inspiration can draw on ideas of Western philosophers, from Pythagoras and Plato to contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Frank Jackson.

The book brings together philosophical ideas and anecdotes from McGirr’s life. In a chapter featuring the ancient Greek philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato, his account of a family visit to the art galleries of Europe leads him to reflect on Thales’s belief that everything is water. From the search of ancient philosophers for objective truth he derives a criticism of the individualism of modern society. After an appreciative account of Pythagoras’s orderly world of numbers – with a nod of sympathy to schoolboys struggling to prove the theorem named after him – McGirr moves on to Plato and his ideal world of beauty and goodness. He then puts the transcendent harmony of the Pythagorean and Platonic worlds to work as an antidote to the pain and despair caused by the tragic contingencies of human existence, exemplified by the Granville train disaster of 1977. ‘At fifteen, I was faced by a world in which bridges fell on people on their way to work. From Pythagoras, I caught a glimpse that this was not everything.’

In this mix of anecdotes, philosophical ideas, and social critique, McGirr throws in jokes about the philosophers and shares with us samples of the ‘wonderful array of bloopers’ in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato, he tells us, believed that the body keeps the head off the ground in order to elevate it towards the gods. The result is a lively, often comic, narrative combined with a romp through some of the key ideas of ancient philosophy. It would be churlish to point out that Plato’s view about the position of the human head is not the only part of his world view that needs to be questioned.

McGirr’s blend of storytelling and philosophy works best when the philosophers he discusses are centrally concerned with the nature of human life and how people should live it. What Henry David Thoreau meant by living life deliberately, and how he did so in an isolated cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, comes to life in McGirr’s loving description of this visionary but practical New Englander. Simone Weil’s account of how attention to suffering can lead us to the core of reality is well illustrated by a student’s shattering and transformative experience in Africa. McGirr’s criticism of the way we objectify others is backed up by the philosophies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, who insist that we cannot know ourselves without breaking down the barrier between self and others. Buber’s interest in Hasidic folk tales also gives McGirr an opportunity to tell traditional rabbi jokes.

McGirr is often at his most insightful and entertaining when discussing the ideas of people who are usually not regarded as philosophers, such as the Sufi mystic Rumi (Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammed Balkhī). He obtains consolation and joy from the essays of Michel de Montaigne, who moves from mundane phenomena like smells or thumbs to insights into the nature of human life, and he gives us an appreciative, amusing account of the quirky utopian novel of Margaret Cavendish, an irrepressible seventeenth-century woman of letters who made herself a fictional home where she could defy her patriarchal society by being the empress of a whole world.

In some chapters, the rivers of narrative and philosophical ideas flow side by side without much mingling of waters. The experiences of a transgender student and William James’s account of truth come together only because both advocate a zestful approach to existence. McGirr’s story of a mother who misuses psychological jargon to complain about the treatment of her son has nothing to do with Wittgenstein’s view that philosophical problems arise from the nature of language.

Sometimes, narrative dominates and philosophy is shoved into the background. Sometimes a philosopher’s life looms larger in McGirr’s account than his or her philosophy, and sometimes he ignores the most important things that a philosopher has to say about how life should be lived. Aristotle appears as a biologist, but not as the creator of an influential conception of ethics.

However, none of this matters. What McGirr draws from the well of philosophy serves his purpose as a storyteller and a critic of society, and he leads us from the personal to the philosophical in an entertaining and often insightful way. Do not expect an analytic depth to which he does not aspire, and do not suppose that the connections he makes between life and philosophy will be the same for everyone. No one who puts a bucket in the well will bring up the same water.