Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

Synopsis

This book tells the story of a young girl named Sophie Amundsen who starts getting mysterious letters. These letters contain a complete course on the history of Western philosophy. The person sending the letters is a wise but puzzling man named Alberto Knox. He takes Sophie, and the reader along with her, on a journey through the ideas of famous thinkers, starting with the very first philosophers before Socrates, and covering big movements like Plato's ideas, Aristotle's logic, the changes during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the dramatic Baroque period, the Age of Reason (Enlightenment), the deep thoughts of Kant, the feelings of Romanticism, the complex ideas of Hegel, the focus on the individual by Kierkegaard, the social theories of Marx, the science of Darwin, the mind studies of Freud, and finally, existentialism. But there's another strange part to the story. Sophie also receives postcards meant for a girl named Hilde Moller Knag. This starts to make Sophie and Alberto wonder if they are just characters in a book that Hilde's father is writing for her 15th birthday. The book uses this interesting story setup to explore really big questions that philosophers have asked for centuries. Questions like: Who are we? Why are we here? What is real? How do we know things? What is right and wrong? And what is the universe made of? By putting these complex ideas inside a story, the book makes philosophy easier to understand and more interesting for people who are new to it, especially young readers.