'Remarkable... What Jostein Gaarder has managed to do is to condense 3,000 years of thought into 400 pages; to simplify some extremely complicated arguments without trivialising them... Sophie's World is an extraordinary achievement'

--Sunday Times

Looking in her mailbox one day, a fourteen-year-old Norwegian schoolgirl called Sophie Amundsen finds two surprising pieces of paper. On them are written the questions: 'Who are you?' and 'Where does the world cnme from?'

The writer is an enigmatic philosopher called Alberto Knox, and his two teasing questions are the beginning of an extraordinary tour through the history of Western Philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Sartre. In a series of brilliantly entertaining letters, and then in person, Alberto Knox opens Sophie's enquiring mind to the fundamental questions that philosophers have been asking since the dawn of civilisation.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

THE TOP HAT

THE MYTHS

THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS

DEMOCRITUS

FATE

SOCRATES

ATHENS

PLATO

THE MAJOR'S CABIN

ARISTOTLE

HELLENISM

THE POSTCARDS

TWO CULTURES

THE MIDDLE AGES

THE RENAISSANCE

THE BAROQUE

DESCARTES

SPINOZA

LOCKE

HUME

BERKELEY

BJERKELY

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

KANT

ROMANTICISM

HEGEL

KIERKEGAARD

MARX

DARWIN

FREUD

OUR OWN TIME

THE GARDEN PARTY

COUNTERPOINT

THE BIG BANG

INDEX