Insurmountable Simplicities
Thirty-Nine Philosophical Conundrums
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"Perhaps not all the stories that follow are true. They could, however, be true, and the Reader is invited to ponder this."
So begins Insurmountable Simplicities, Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi's colorful incarnation of the many philosophical conundrums that hide in the wrinkles of everyday life. Why do mirrors seem to invert left and right but not up and down? How do we know whether strawberries taste the same for everyone? Where is it written that we must observe the law, and if it is not written, why should we observe it? What if we could swap brains-or the rest of our bodies?
Insurmountable Simplicities is filled with stories, dialogues, and epistolary exchanges that cover a range of themes-such as personal identity, causality and responsibility, fortune, the nature of things, the paradoxes of time and space, the interface between logic and language-in captivating and inventive ways.
Clear, concise, and intellectually engaging, this internationally acclaimed book brilliantly demonstrates that the beauty of philosophy resides in its thorough engagement with the simplicities of the world, insurmountable as they might initially appear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bite-sized bits of thought-provoking philosophy are cunningly explored in this little book of brainteasers. Philosopher-authors Casati and Varzi use playlets, short fiction and imagined correspondence to explore philosophical conundrums ranging from time travel to the sinister ways mirrors work. The prose tends toward the roundabout ("Cause and Time are addressed, including whether it is reasonable to build a machine to travel back into the Past, and whether, by traveling back into the Past, one could induce changes in the Present") in the introductions to such Twilight Zone-esque scenarios as "Playing Lotto in Reverse City," where lottery tickets are free and most allow players to earn one dollar (though the possibility exists that a player will have to pay $1 million), and "Row 13," in which naming a building's 13th floor something else doesn't change the fact that it's the 13th floor. And though the script format the authors deploy is clever, the dialogue is cumbersomely campy, if not frequently obtuse (One argument features characters "talking about up/down, left/right, and front/back in a completely different sense, with reference to the external space."). Fun and best digested in small doses, this collection of paradoxes will stimulate its share of head-scratching.
