Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
Uploaded by hayley_fisher on Sep 13, 1999
Sophie's World is about the life of a 14 year-old girl called Sophie Amundsen. It takes you on a journey though 3000 years of Western philosophy, presenting important and in most cases annoying questions.
This is the explanation of philosophy and philosophers given in the book:
"A white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. Because it is an extremely large rabbit, the trick takes many billions of years. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care.
'What a bunch of troublemakers!' they say. And keep on chatting: Would you pass the butter please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatoes?"
Some of the questions raised include:
Why are we here?
Is there a God?
Where does the world come from?
This book attempts to tell you what people in the past have thought, fusing the historical side with the story itself.
Sophie is taking a course in philosophy from Alberto Knox. Together they are trying to find their own answers to the questions so important to mankind. Then Sophie begins to receive postcards addressed to Hilde. But who is Hilde? And why are the postcards being sent care of Sophie? Coupled with the course in philosophy, Sophie and Alberto begin to question their very existence. Sophie finds a book about herself in a book about herself, and things seem to fall into place. Does the world Sophie and all her friends live in exist at all, or is it just in someone's imagination or even in a book? And can Sophie manage to escape from her world and find Hilde? This book is fairly long, and the sections about the history of philosophy can get quite boring, but I still enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone above the...