a good question

From my 5-year-old nephew, the youngest of them: “How do birthdays make you older?”

I’m trying out Sophie’s World in my Intro class for the first time, primarily because so many of my Dutch students (and not a few Egyptian ones) became hooked on philosophy as 14-year-olds by reading that book. Nice work by Gaarder in pitching the philosophy at just the right level, and also in coming up with an appealing framing story: it’s interesting that just reading about the pre-Socratics would be more demanding than reading about Sophie reading about them, and I think there’s probably a psychoanalytic point to be made about this.

In fact, I wonder if you could simplify just about anything in this way… the “Sophie Method,” let’s call it. If you’re having trouble with Hegel’s Logic, just make up a story about how Sophie found it in her mailbox one day and was confused as she was reading it. I’m not quite sure why it would make the Hegel easier, but I’m sure it would.

But back to the main topic… Gaarder makes the familiar point in this book that children are natural philosophers and gradually lose that ability. Whatever intellectual puzzles exist in most of our lives are fairly minuscule compared with the thought that birthdays must have the magical power to age you. Or, in the case of my friend’s daughter Beatrice (the same one mentioned in my time, space, essence essay) wondering how anyone could think the world is flat given that rainbows are obviously curved. I only wish I could come up with stuff like that on a regular basis.