Sophie's World

“All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit’s fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence.” 

When Alberto begins writing letters to Sophie about the nature and history of philosophy, he begins by explaining philosophy as a practice, a way of reasoning, and a way of living. Alberto uses an extended metaphor to compare the feat of philosophers to a rabbit being pulled from a magician’s hat. The magician may be God or some other force, and the rabbit is existence. People are born on the tips of the fur, wide-eyed and open to all possibilities and ways of thinking; as they age, however, they fall into patterns and habits that keep them comfortable and secure. It is the duty of a philosopher to have the courage to crawl back up again to examine the nature of existence.

“The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for natural processes.”

In Ancient Greece, philosophers such as Socrates, Democritus, Aristotle, and Plato sought answers to life’s questions without relying on theological explanations. Socrates developed the Socratic method of reasoning, which he used to force people to question their own logic and ideas. Plato, his pupil, took up his task after Socrates’s execution and developed the world of ideas theory and the myth of the cave. Aristotle introduced scientific reasoning to Greece through his observation of