Sophie's World
Jostein Gaarder
Sophie's World
Jostein Gaarder
A Novel About the History of Philosophy: a mysterious course of letters leads a Norwegian schoolgirl from the first Greek thinkers to the twentieth century, and to a startling discovery about her own world
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- 12 key ideas
- Text
- Published 1991
Introduction
Sophie's World is a novel that is also an introduction to the history of Western philosophy. Sophie Amundsen, a Norwegian schoolgirl about to turn fifteen, receives anonymous letters that ask "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?", followed by a course in philosophy from a teacher called Alberto Knox. At the same time, strange postcards keep arriving for another girl, Hilde Møller Knag, from her father, a UN major in Lebanon.
The lessons follow the order of history: the myths and the first Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the schools that came after Alexander the Great, the meeting of Greek thought with Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque, Descartes and Spinoza, Locke, Hume and Berkeley, the Enlightenment and Kant, Romanticism, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Marx, Darwin and Freud, and Sartre and our own time. Halfway through, Sophie and Alberto discover that they are characters in a book that Hilde's father has written as a birthday present for his daughter, and they try to escape from it.
This summary groups the philosophers by period, following the book's order, and tells the frame story briefly. Notes: the book presents religions, including Christianity, as part of the history of ideas; this summary reports them as the book presents them. Views on people and events are reported as the book's or as those of its characters. The English quotes are from the English translation by Paulette Møller, first published in 1994; the Dari quotes are our own translation of that English text.
- 1Philosophy begins with wonder: a girl finds two notes asking "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?", and the first Greek thinkers set out to explain the world without myths
- 2Socrates taught by asking questions, knew that he knew nothing, and paid for his questions with his life
- 3Plato held that behind the changing world we see lies an eternal world of ideas, which only reason can know, and pictured most people as prisoners watching shadows in a cave
- 4Aristotle brought philosophy back down to earth: forms exist in things themselves, all knowledge starts with the senses, and a good life lies in balance
- 5After Alexander, philosophy became a search for a calm life without fear of death; then two cultures met, Christianity spread, and medieval thinkers joined faith with Plato and Aristotle
- 6The Renaissance put the human being back at the centre and made observation and measurement the road to knowledge, and the Baroque age that followed saw life as a stage and a dream
- 7Descartes doubted everything until only "I think, therefore I am" was left and split the world into mind and matter; Spinoza answered that God and nature are one
- 8The empiricists traced every idea back to the senses, and Berkeley's claim that the world exists only in a mind reveals the novel's secret: Sophie and Alberto live inside a book
- 9The Enlightenment trusted reason and fought for human rights, and Kant argued that our minds shape how we experience the world and that the moral law comes from reason
- 10The Romantics answered cool reason with feeling and a world spirit, Hegel saw history as thinking that grows through opposites, and Kierkegaard defended the single person who must choose
- 11Marx, Darwin and Freud saw human beings as part of nature and history: shaped by economic conditions, by evolution, and by an unconscious mind
- 12Sartre says we are condemned to be free and must create ourselves; then Sophie and Alberto escape the book, and the story ends under the stars with "we too are stardust"
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