Review: Sophie's World

Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder is a novel about the history of philosophy. The first half of the novel deals with a young Norwegian girl named Sophie who begins receiving mysterious letters from an unknown sender. These letters constitute what is essentially a correspondence course in the history of philosophy. Beginning with the Pre-Socratics, such as Anaximander, Empedocles, and (everyone's favorite) Democritus, Sophie's mysterious teacher takes her through the history of western philosophy.

The second half of the novel takes a very strange turn, as Sophie and her teacher realize that they are characters in a novel and set out on a course to escape from their fictional world. Meanwhile, the novel's author begins to wonder if he too, isn't the product of some other author's imagination. By the end, it is a massive meta-fictional jumble of Disney characters and pixies and magic geese (sadly, this is not a joke). Despite this rather insane turn of events, I still enjoyed the novel.

In truth, I often found myself skimming over the 'novelish' parts of the novel because, frankly, they weren't that great. Perhaps it was a translation issue (which I doubt), but the story parts of the novel were pretty dull. I kept slogging through the 500+ pages of this novel, though because I so thoroughly enjoyed the philosophical sketches presented by Sophie's teacher. Most of the major philosophers in history were discussed: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, Berkeley, Kierkegaard, etc. The only really notable absence was Leibniz. The philosophical systems of these individuals were presented in a very accessible way. Gains in accessibility are often made by sacrificing accuracy. In some cases - the chapter on Kant, for example - the novel misses some fairly major points. For the most part, however, Sophie's World does a commendable job of presenting the philosophical systems with a decent degree of accuracy.

I am giving this novel a rather inflated grade, I admit. But for someone interested in reviewing the history of western thought, or someone learning about the history of philosophy for the first time, Sophie's World is a pretty good place to start.

Grade: 4/5