Sophie's World

 Sophie's World ~ A novel about the history of philosophy

Author Jostein Gaarder

ISBN: 978-0-374-53071-6

Hi Everyone

I am left amazed with the information this books carries inside.  I was taken on journey through the history of philosophy from the great Myths to the most recent of days.  I was continually amazed at what I was reading.  I have always enjoyed educational philosophy but cannot say that I have delved deeply into all the philosophers that Jostein Gaardern has presented me with now. I read with a notebook beside me, jotting down all that I wanted to look deeper into.  The great minds of the past are interesting, they are people who dared to think!  Even more so they dared to speak and write their philosophical ideas to the rest of the world. 

Here is a list of some of the chapters....

• Myths
• Democritus
• Fate - The fortune-teller
• Socrates
• Athens
• Plato
• Aristotle
• Hellenism
• The Middle Ages
• The renaissance
• The Baroque
• Descartes
• Spinoza
• Locke
• Hume
• Berkeley
• The Enlightenment
• Kant
• Romanticism
• Hegel
• Kierkegaard
• Marx
• Darwin
• Freud
• The Big Bang

See!  A history lesson right inside a 'living book'!

Then to add to the joy of reading about all these philosophies you are given a novel about Sophie, and Hilde comes to the mystery too.  Who is Hilde? When you find out you will be questioning who is Sophie.  Quite a twist, to say the least 💁

I have only one comment to add. I was expecting more from the ending. I had all these great ideas about how the story was going to end but not the one that it ended on.  None the less, I would read it again just for the historical commentary that I journeyed through in reading it.

Description:

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 enrols 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.

Happy Reading