Wanting to understand the most fundamental questions of the universe isn't the province of ivory-tower intellectuals alone, as this book's enormous popularity has demonstrated. A young girl, Sophie, becomes embroiled in a discussion of philosophy with a faceless correspondent. At the same time, she must unravel a mystery involving another young girl, Hilde, by using everything she's learning. The truth is far more complicated than she could ever have imagined.

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 enrolls 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.

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

Notes on Some Philosophers

Index