Sophies World Essay Example For Students

Sophies World Essay Sophies World Sophie’s World Looking in her mailbox one afternoon, a fourteen- year- old Norwegian schoolgirl named Sophie Amundsen finds a surprising white envelope containing a piece of paper. On it are written two questions: â€Å"Who are you?† and â€Å"Where did the world come from?†. And at the same time she is also receiving letters for a girl named Hilde Moller Kang and Sophie also finds a silk red scarf in her bedroom, not belonging to her, but to this girl Hilde. The writer is an enigmatic philosopher named Albert Knox and his messenger is his dog Hermes. Albert Knox’s two teasing questions are the beginning of an extraordinary journey through philosophy from philosophers such as what I have read so far: Thales, Anaximenes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxgoras, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Albert Knox, whom Sophie has not met in person or even seen for that matter, has been inquiring Sophie’s mind to fundamental que stions that philosophers have been asking since the dawn of civilization. Sophie is soon enough enrolled in this correspondence course. Everyday she gets either a white envelope containing puzzling questions or a brown envelope containing type written papers teaching her about what philosophy is and explaining to her all these philosophers and their theories. Sophie’s first lesson in philosophy was, â€Å"What is philosophy?†. How I understood what was being said was that philosophy is the examination for beliefs and an analysis of the basic concepts said in the expression of such beliefs. Philosophy is often used to mean a set of values and attitudes toward life, nature, and society. Next Sophie learned about was Thalas. According to Thalas, the original principle of all things is water, from which everything proceeds and into which everything is again resolved. My analysis on that is how can he come to that conclusion? Yes, all living things contain water within them selves, but it seems preposterous for him to say that we evolved from water. Living things not only contain water but contain substances. The only logical conclusion that Sophie found was that water turns into ice, and ice can go back to flowing water again. Another philosopher that was discussed along with Thalas was Anaximander. Anaximander held that all things eventually return to the element from which they originated. When a plant dies it desinigrates into the ground and the ground is where the plant originated from, so I can see where Anaximender could propose that. But human beings did not originate from the ground, unless he did have religious beliefs, such that human evolved from dirt. So when he/she dies they go back to where they originated, so I could see where that concept might come into place. Although Anaximenes had a different concept. He held the concept that air is the primary element to which everything else can be reduced. To explain how solid objects are formed from air, he introduced the notions of condensation and rarefaction. These processes, he claimed, make air, in itself invisible, visible as water, fire, and solid matter. He thought that air becomes warmer and turns into fire when it rarefied and that it turns colder and turns solid when condensed. How I see it his attempt was to discover the ultimate nature of reality. On the other hand, Sophie learned about Parmenidas’s philosophy. Parmendias’s philosophy demonstrated the reality of the absolute being, the nonexistence of which Parmenidas declared to be inconceivable, but the nature of which, he admitted to be equally inconceivable, as it is dissociated from every limitation under which human beings think. How I understand it, he held the fact that reality, is not known to the senses but it is to be found only in reason. He plainly says that beings cannot rise from nonbeing, and that being neither rises nor passes away. T. Anaxagoras introduced the notion of reason. I got the impression after reading this theory that all matter had existed originally as atoms, or molecules, that these atoms, infinitely numerous and small, had existed all eternity, and that order was first produced out of this infinite chaos of atoms through the influence of intelligence. He believed that all bodies are simple aggressions of atoms. 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