Starting with Socrates, whose injunction to ‘know thyself’ has provided many thinkers with a model of the philosophical life, and ending with Nietzsche, James Miller provides brief biographies of twelve philosophers. The selection features both canonical figures such as Augustine, Descartes and Kant, and less obvious thinkers including Diogenes, Montaigne and Emerson, but every one of them has ‘struggled to live his life according to a deliberately chosen set of precepts and believes’. Previously in Postscript as The Philosophical Life.