Sophie's World

This is the book I am currently reading.



Plot summary
Sophie Amundsen (Sofie Amundsen in the Norwegian version) is a fourteen year old girl living in Norway in 1990. She lives with her cat Sherekan and her mother. Her father is a captain of an oil tanker, and is away for most of the year. He does not appear in the book.

Sophie's life is rattled as the book begins, when she receives two anonymous messages in her mailbox (Who are you? Where does the world come from?), as well as a post card addressed to 'Hilde Møller Knag, c/o Sophie Amundsen'. Shortly afterwards she receives a packet of papers, part of a correspondence course in philosophy.

With these mysterious communications, Sophie becomes the student of a fifty-year-old philosopher, Alberto Knox. He starts out as totally anonymous, but as the story unfolds he reveals more and more about himself. The papers and the packet both turn out to be from him, although the post card is not; it is addressed from someone called Albert Knag, who is in a United Nations peacekeeping unit stationed in Lebanon.

Alberto teaches her about the history of philosophy. She gets a substantive and understandable review from the Pre-Socratic Greeks through Jean-Paul Sartre. Along with the philosophy lessons, Sophie and Alberto try and outwit the mysterious Albert Knag, who appears to have God-like powers, which Alberto finds quite troubling.

Sophie learns about medieval philosophy while being lectured by Alberto, dressed as a monk, in an ancient church, and she learns about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a French café. Various philosophical questions and methods of reasoning are put before Sophie, as she attempts to work them out on her own. Many of Knox's philosophic packets to her are preluded by more short questions, such as "Why is Lego the most ingenious toy in the world?".

Alberto takes Sophie from Hellenism to the rise of Christianity and its interaction with Greek thought and on into the Middle Ages. Over the course of the book, he covers the Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment and Romantic periods, and the philosophies that stemmed from them.