Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

The white envelope read: “Sophie Amundsen, 3 Clover Close.” That was all; it did not say whom it was from. There was no stamp on it either. As soon as Sophie had closed the gate behind her she opened the envelope. It contained only a slip of paper no bigger than the envelope. It read: Who are you?

You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.

Hello again! As you see, this short course in philosophy will come in handy-sized portions.

THE ONLY THING WE REQUIRE TO BE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS IS THE FACULTY OF WONDER.

To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable—bewildering, even enigmatic.

Perhaps the myth was an attempt to explain the changing seasons of the year: in the winter Nature dies because Thor’s hammer is in Jotunheim. But in the spring he succeeds in winning it back. So the myth tried to give people an explanation for something they could not understand.

There are a great many examples from other parts of the world of the way people dramatized their myths of the seasons in order to speed up the processes of nature.

The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for natural processes.

One philosopher might want to know how plants and animals came into being. Another might want to know whether there is a God or whether man has an immortal soul.

Once we have determined what a particular philosopher’s project is, it is easier to follow his line of thought, since no one philosopher concerns himself with the whole of philosophy.

The earliest Greek philosophers are sometimes called natural philosophers because they were mainly concerned with the natural world and its processes.

A rationalist is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.

Empedocles believed that all in all, nature consisted of four elements, or “roots” as he termed them. These four roots were earth, air, fire, and water.

Democritus agreed with his predecessors that transformations in nature could not be due to the fact that anything actually “changed.” He therefore assumed that everything was built up of tiny invisible blocks, each of which was eternal and immutable. Democritus called these smallest units atoms. The word “a-tom” means “un-cuttable.”

In our own time, however, scientists have discovered that atoms can be broken into smaller “elemental particles.” We call these elemental particles protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Fatalism is the belief that whatever happens is predestined.

The word “sophist” means a wise and informed person. In Athens, the Sophists made a living out of teaching the citizens for money.

A person who is unable to say categorically whether or not the gods or God exists is called an agnostic.

The life of Socrates is mainly known to us through the writings of Plato, who was one of his pupils and who became one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

By playing ignorant, Socrates forced the people he met to use their common sense. Socrates could feign ignorance—or pretend to be dumber than he was. We call this Socratic irony.

Unlike the Sophists, he did not teach for money. No, Socrates called himself a philosopher in the true sense of the word. A “philosopher” really means “one who loves wisdom.”

Plato was a poet and mythologist; Aristotle’s writings were as dry and precise as an encyclopedia. On the other hand, much of what he wrote was based on up-to-the-minute field studies.

“The word ‘baroque’ comes from a word that was first used to describe a pearl of irregular shape. Irregularity was typical of Baroque art, which was much richer in highly contrastive forms than the plainer and more harmonious Renaissance art.

Another Latin expression that was widely quoted was ‘memento mori,’ which means ‘remember that you must die.’ In art, a painting could depict an extremely luxurious lifestyle, with a little skull painted in one corner.