ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512050031
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY BRADLEY A. KELLEY
SOPHIE'S WORLD: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. By Jostein Gaarder. Translated by Paulette Moller. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. $19.
Sophie Amundsen and her best friend, Joanna, walk home from school, talking about robots, computers and their similarities to humans. Are human brains just computers, they ponder? Sophie stops at the mailbox to sort through what is for a 14-year-old girl all too often only a stack of mail for her parents. But this day there is a mysterious enveloped addressed to her and containing just one question: "Who are you?"
Before the day is out, another message appears in the box: "Where does the world come from?"
Soon, entire lectures arrive for her from a mysterious philosopher, and she gets strange birthday greetings from a girl her age she has never heard of.
Thus begins one of the most ingenious introductions to philosophy in modern times. Sophie meets her philosopher, Alberto Knox, and his messenger dog, Hermes, and proceeds under his tutelage through a course in the history of philosophy, beginning with a brief but insightful description of the nature of philosophy itself. Alberto notes, as Aristotle did, that philosophy begins with wonder. All too often, Alberto points out with clever example and apt metaphors, adults forget to wonder.
Incorporating chapters on most of the major figures in western philosophy (wisely, Gaarder decides not to tackle non-Western thought), and briefer discussions of many minor figures, the book proceeds chronologically, from the very beginnings of philosophical thought with Thales and the naturalistic philosophers of Greece in 600 B.C., up to a brief discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century.
Gaarder refrains from making truth-value judgments about the various ideas, using Alberto to admonish Sophie, who often does leap to judgment, against doing so. For example, the history of human thinking about religion is a major theme of the book, as it should be, but Gaarder never tells us what to think about it. Belief in God, for instance, is not assumed to be true, but it is never ridiculed or assumed false, either.
In a country that is undergoing deep turmoil about the place of religion in education, all too often failing to steer between the Scylla of ignoring religious influence on history and the Charybdis of teaching religion solely for indoctrination, the book can serve as a case study for educators and parents. Readers are given the necessary historical and philosophical tools for thinking about the subject, but are stimulated to draw conclusions (and, often, to refrain from drawing conclusions) for themselves.
Like all good books, especially mysteries such as this one, reality is often not what it appears. In "Sophie's World," reality is radically different than it appears, in much the way Descartes, Berkeley and Hume worried that the world might be. The "real reality" of the plot, if I may, is adequately foreshadowed and revealed a little more than half way through the book. The reader might come to agree with me that that is too soon. Still, that should not dissuade a person from reading "Sophie's World." The time for such quibbling is after reading the book, for then the quibbling will turn into interesting, enlightening discussion of philosophy with others who have read it, too.
Bradley A. Kelley teaches philosophy at Roanoke College.
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