Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics)
by Jostein Gaarder
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jostein GaarderTranslator: Paulette Moller
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-03-20
ISBN: 0374530718
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374530716
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics)
Book Review: Beautiful!
Summary: 5 Stars
What a wonderful book! We are truly extraordinary beings, and this book will show you this. Prepare yourself to embark on an exciting journey of the mind--you'll come back a different person. The author will take you on a journey to the minds of the past philosophers, and in the process, within your own mind. You'll find out that it is easier to ask philosophical questions than to answer them. Philosophy is not something you can learn, but perhaps you can learn to think philosophically.
A "philosopher" really is one who loves wisdom. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder. Babies have this faculty. But as they grow up the faculty of wonder seems to diminish. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem unreasonable, bewildering, and enigmatic. To illustrate, a child is sitting on a baby chair having his breakfast. Suddenly, he sees his father float in mid-air. At the same time his mother sees her husband floating in mid-air, drops the dishes on the floor, and screams. Why is that? To the child, seeing his father float in mid-air is exciting but nothing unusual. After all, everyday he witnesses something new. To his mother, however, it is an impossibility to have a person float in mid-air. She is a creature of habit, stuck in a certain reality. A child's reality is unlimited and ever expanding, just like a philosopher's world. The world is also floating in space!
Because man thought it was so astonishing to be alive, philosophical questions arose on their own accord. By philosophy we mean the completely new way of thinking that evolved in Greece about six hundred years before the birth of Christ. Until that time people had found answers to all their questions in various religions and myths. Greek philosophers attempted to prove that these explanations were not to be trusted. The philosopher Xenophanes, who lived from about 570 B.C., said that men have created the gods in their own image. "They believe gods were born and have bodies and clothes and language just as we have. Ethiopians believe that the gods are black and flat-nosed. Northern Europeans imagine them to be blue-eyed and fair-haired. If oxen, horses, and lions could draw, they would depict gods that looked like oxen, horses, and lions!" So philosophy gradually liberated itself from religion.
What is the origin of the universe? At some point something must have come from nothing. But that notion was soon changed to `something cannot come from nothing', therefore all that is always existed. This meant that there is something of everything in everything. Once it is accepted that nothing can change, that nothing can come out of nothing, and that nothing is ever lost, then nature must consist of infinitesimal blocks that can join and separate again. This was the theory of Democritus, and for this reason he is today credited with being the inventor of the most ingenious toy in the world--Lego. The world consists of blocks, just like Lego blocks, that can join and separate again and form unlimited forms. Today we know this to be true. DNA is such an example.
Socrates said that the wisest is he who does not know. He said, "One thing I only know, and that is that I know nothing." The essential nature of Socrates' art lay in the fact that he did not appear to want to instruct people. On the contrary he gave the impression of one desiring to learn from those he spoke with. So instead of lecturing like a traditional schoolmaster, he discussed. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to "give birth" to the correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. And only the understanding that comes from within can lead to true insight.
A philosopher is constantly striving to achieve true insight. Let's examine the following analogy presented by Plato: Imagine some people living in an underground cave. They sit with their backs to the mouth of the cave with their hands and feet bound in such a way that they can only look at the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a high wall, and behind that wall pass human-like creatures, holding up various figures above the top of the wall. Because there is a fire behind these figures, they cast flickering shadows on the back wall of the cave. So the only thing the cave dwellers can see is this shadow play. They have been siding in this position since they were born, so they think these shadows are all there are. Imagine now that one of the cave dwellers manages to free himself from his bonds. The first thing he asks himself is where all these shadows on the cave wall come from. What do you think happens when he turns around and sees the figures being held up above the wall? To begin with he is dazzled by the sharp sunlight. He is also dazzled by the clarity of the figures because until now he has only seen their shadow. If he manages to climb over the wall and get past the fire into the world outside, he will be even more dazzled. But after rubbing his eyes he will be struck by the beauty of everything. For the first time he will see colors and clear shapes. He will see the real animals and flowers that the cave shadows were only poor reflections of. But even now he will ask himself where all the animals and flowers come from. Then he will see the sun in the sky, and realize that this is what gives life to these flowers and animals, just as the fire made the shadows visible. The joyful cave dweller could now have gone skipping away into the countryside, delighting in his new-found freedom. But instead he thinks of all the others who are still down in the cave. He goes back. Once there, he tries to convince the cave dwellers that the shadows on the cave wall are but flickering reflections of `real' things. But they don't believe him. They point to the cave wall and say that what they see is all there is. Finally they kill him. What Plato was illustrating in the `Myth of the Cave' is the philosopher's road from shadowy images to the true ideas behind all natural phenomena.
Many philosophers believe that the search for God is natural to all men. Sartre believed that life must have meaning. It is an imperative. But it is we ourselves who must create this meaning in our own lives. To exist is to create your own life. Swami Vivekenanda, an Indian who was instrumental in bringing Hinduism to the west, once said, 'Just as certain world religions say that people who do not believe in a personal God are atheist, we say that a person who does not believe in himself is an atheist. Not believing in the splendor of one's own soul is what we call atheism.
In `As You Like It' Shakespeare writes:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
Spinoza says that God did not create the world in order to stand outside it. No, God is the world. He believed that God--or the laws of nature--is the inner cause of everything that happens. He is not an outer cause, since God speaks through the laws of nature and only through them. For example, does a lion decide to become carnivorous? Can a lion suddenly decide to become vegetarian? Similarly, do humans have freewill? For that matter, does God exist in the first place, or is God a creation of our mind? Hume gives us a theory. According to him, an 'angel' is a complex idea. It is a false idea which must be immediately rejected. Why? Have you seen a human being before? Of course you have. Have you seen wings on birds before? Of course you have. Have you seen wings on a human being? According to Hume, none of us have. In this case we have to admit that the brain has done a good job of cutting and pasting together all on its own. Each element was once sensed, and entered the theater of the mind in the form of a real impression. Nothing is ever actually invented by the mind. The mind puts things together and constructs false 'ideas.' But Hume emphasizes that all the elements we put together in our ideas must at some time have entered the mind in the form of simple impressions. For example, a person who has never seen gold will never be able to visualize streets of gold.
Are we living in a world of dreams? Is the whole world made off spirit, and thus nothing solid? Let's say you hit a table with your fist. You had a sensation of something hard, but you didn't feel the actual matter in the table. In the same way, you can dream you are hitting something hard, but there isn't anything hard in a dream. We exist only in the mind of God. So 'to be or not to be' is not the whole question. The question is also who we are. Are we really human beings of flesh and blood? Does our world consist of real things--or are we encircled by the mind. According to some philosophers, we are spirit, and nothing in our world is solid! Novalis said that 'the world becomes a dream, and the dreams become reality.' The English Romantic poet Coleridge expressed the same idea; saying something like this: What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful Flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hands. Ah, what then?
We live in a complicated and mysterious world. If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent. Similarly, we are like the paper, with events drawn on us. But what do these events signify? What is the truth behind life? According to Kierkegaard, rather than searching for the Truth with a capital T, it is more important to find the kind of truths that are meaningful to the individual's life. It is important to find 'the truth for me.'
You and I also began with the Big Bang, because all substance in the universe is an organic unity. Once in a primeval age all matter was gathered in a clump so enormously massive that a pinhead weighed many billions of tons. This 'primeval atom' exploded because of the enormous gravitation. It was as if something disintegrated. When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves. Beautiful! Now you know why you look up at the sky when you are in search of God!
But what is this earthly substance? What was it that exploded that time billions of years ago? Where did it come from?' These questions concern us all very deeply because we ourselves are of that substance. We are a spark from the great fire that was ignited many billions of years ago.
In case that spark has extinguished in your life, this book will rekindle it. Read this book--you'll love it!
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Summary of Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics)
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print.
One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Wanting to understand the most fundamental questions of the universe isn't the province of ivory-tower intellectuals alone, as this book's enormous popularity has demonstrated. A young girl, Sophie, becomes embroiled in a discussion of philosophy with a faceless correspondent. At the same time, she must unravel a mystery involving another young girl, Hilde, by using everything she's learning. The truth is far more complicated than she could ever have imagined.
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