On a long, cold winter night, more than three hundred years ago, Mister Descartes is suddenly beset by profound doubts: Can I trust my senses, or am I fooled by illusions? Is there an Evil Genius behind all things? What if the outside world is only a dream? Is my own existence nothing but the product of my imagination?
“Tell us, Delphic Oracle, who is the wisest man in all of Greece?” So begins The Death of Socrates . No mortal man is wiser than Socrates, who, on his daily walks through Athens, talks to all the people he meets. When the person he talks to takes himself to be very wise, Socrates asks so many questions that the person ends up admitting he knows nothing. When he runs into people who know little, Socrates sets them on the way to wisdom. But not everyone shares Socrates’s love for the truth. When the people of Athens put him on trial for his ceaseless questioning, how will he find the courage to continue to speak the truth?
What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? What’s for dinner? More than two hundred years ago, on a day that takes quite a peculiar course, Professor Kant is working hard to give an answer to all these questions. Not only the morning papers, but also a slightly perfumed letter get in his way however. As a result, he even forgets to go out on his regular digestive walk – and everything goes off the rails…
Vienna, 1714: Late in life, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the universal genius of his time, puts down his pen and declares his description of the universe to be complete. In the evening, he sits in his study room among letters, books, and manuscripts as his young friend Theodor comes for a visit. Theodor is bothered by one question: Why is there evil? And why do people commit crimes? With an example from ancient Greek mythology, Leibniz develops his theory about the best of all possible worlds. With this vivid "story within a story" Jean Paul Mongin successfully imparts the complex philosophical ideas of Leibniz to young readers. At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life's "big questions," however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children--and curious grown-ups--to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging--and often funny--story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations.
Why is a horse called a horse? and not a giraffe or a flapdoodle? Discover philosophy with Plato!