Sophie's World (1991) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

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• Sofie Amundsen: 14-year old girl, lives with her mother in Norway. She is the main character who learns philosophy from Alberto Knox
• Alberto Knox: The name of the philosopher who is giving Sophie the course in Philosophy.
• Hilde Møller Knag: The girl to which the letters are addressed to.
• Joanna / Jorunn: Sophie Amundsen's friend
• Plato: A philosopher who believed that everything in nature changes, but that there is an eternal world of ideas outside of the natural world
• Aristotle: Pupil of Plato. His project involved studying the changes within nature, and he believed in the use of one's senses.
• The Cynics: A group of people during Hellenism period who believed that happiness had nothing to do with material goods.
• The Stoics: A group of people during Hellenism period who came after the Cynics, believed that there was a universal natural law that "governed all mankind." They felt that we are all part of the same nature.
• The Epicureans: A group of people during Hellenism period who were less interested in political affairs and felt that pleasure should be sought in life.
• Descartes: Descartes doubted everything that was not certain and then realized that the very fact of his doubting meant he must be thinking. His famous quote was "I think, therefore I am"
• Spinoza: He was heavily influenced by Descartes. However, he rejected Descartes's dualism and believed that thought and extension are simply two of God's features that we can perceive. He had a deterministic view of the world, believing that God controlled all through natural laws. Spinoza felt that only God was truly free but that people could attain happiness through seeing things "from the perspective of eternity."
• Socrates: A philosopher who lived in Athens. Pretty much everything that we know about him come from the writings that was written by his pupil, Plato.
• Albert Knag: The man who sends the letters. He is the father of Hilde. He is a major for the UN. He wants to be a writer.
• Locke: He believed that we could perceive simple sensations, and that we build these up through reflection to form complex ideas. However, he also divided the world into primary and secondary qualities, and only the first—such as size or number—are accurately reproduced. Secondary qualities, like taste, vary from person to person.
• Soren Kierkegaard: philosopher
• St. Augustine: He was a Christian Platonist who brought Plato's philosophy into Christianity.
• St. Thomas Aquinas: He brought Aristotle into the Christian religion and he tried to show that reason and faith do not come into conflict.
• Sigmund Freud: A philosopher, “the father of psychoanalysis”, whose theories included the rawness and natural expression of humans, as sexuality and repression are.
• W. Heeren: Add a description of this character.
• Parmenides: Greek philosopher who believed that nothing actually changed. He was the first rationalist because he held to his reason despite the evidence of his senses
• Heraclitus: Greek philosopher who believed in his senses and felt that nothing stayed the same
• Empedocles: Greek philosopher who suggested that there were four basic substances and that all changes are the result of intermingling of the four
• Anaxagoras: He believed that nature was made up of infinitesimal particles but each one contained part of everything
• Democritus: The Greek philosopher who believed that everything was made up of tiny, invisible and eternal particles call atoms
• Marx: a historical materialist, historian, sociologist, and econoist, influenced by Hegel
• Darwin: Charles Darwin. Writer of The Origin of Species
• Kant
• Jeremy
• Luther
• Adam
• Thales
• David
• Mrs. Ingebrigtsen: Joanna's/Jorunn's mother (often described like a Barbie)
• Sophia
• Rousseau
• Alice
• Helene Amundsen: Sophie’s mother. Usually worried about her daughter’s strange behaviour.
• Kepler
• Anne
• Abraham
• Govinda: Sophie’s beloved mascot; a tortoise.
• Lamarck
• Anaximenes
• Alexander

Quotes edit see section history

• “And only the understanding that comes from within can lead to true insight”

• “A philosopher never gets quite used to the world”

• “At some point something must have come from nothing”

• “But it is we ourselves who must create this meaning in our own lives”

• “By philosophy we mean the completely new way of thinking that evolved in Greece about six hundred years before the birth of Christ”

• “Ethiopians believe that the gods are black and flat-nosed”

• “If oxen, horses, and lions could draw, they would depict gods that looked like oxen, horses, and lions”

• “Nothing is ever actually invented by the mind”

• “The essential nature of Socrates' art lay in the fact that he did not appear to want to instruct people”

• “The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder”

• “When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves”

• “...both children and adults did things that they probably regretted afterwards, precisely because they had done them against their better judgement”

  Sophie Amundsen

• “(Sophie's mother explained to her that she didn't feel like she changed at all after her 15th birthday and Sophie answered...) ...You haven't. Nothing changes. You have just developed, gotten older...”

  Sophie Amundsen

• “Being interested in why we are here is not a “casual” interest like collecting stamps. People who ask such questions are taking part in a debate that has gone on as long as man has lived on this planet.”

• “You can't experience being alive without realizing that you have to die. But it's just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.”

• “Reason manifests above all in language and Language is something we are born into. Therefore, it’s the language the forms the individual and not the individual who forms the language.”

  Hegel

• “Because a frog could not just grow out of a cabbage patch, however much you watered it.”

• “If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn’t understand it.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Lebanon: major Alberto Knag is serving in Lebanon under UN
• Bjerkely: Hilde lives in Bjerkely
• Lillesand: Sophie and Alberto Knox live there

Organizations edit see section history

• United Nations (UN): Add a description of this organization.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Medieval: Anything that is over-authoritative and inflexible
• A-tom: Un-cuttable
• Epicurean: To describe someone who lives only for pleasure
• Rationalist: Someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world
• Dualist: Someone that effects a sharp division between the reality of thought and extended reality
• Empiricist: A person who derives all knowledge of the world from what the senses tell him
• Fatalist: A person who believes that everything in life was predetermined
• Pantheism: Belief in many gods like those practiced by Indo-European culture
• Monotheism: Belief in only one god like those practiced by Semitic culture

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

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• Books: The very medium of the book is used to help illustrate philosophical points.
• Dreams: Sophie's World contains many dreams, some of which are not easily differentiated from reality. In fact, dreams are used quite effectively to question our sense of reality.
• The Garden of Eden: This is probably the first theme brought in the series as Sophie's starts philosophizing over the two letters she received at the start of the book. The imagery of The Big Bang and the Garden of Eden are then brought to the reader.
• The Top Hat: One of the first letters suggest that what is most important in life is philosophizing—attempting to understand ourselves and our role in the world. There are not many philosophical questions, but there are many ways to answer each one. Life itself is like a magic trick, and philosophers must always observe it with wonder. After reading the letter, Sophie goes back to the mailbox and finds another one, which stresses the fact that all that is required to be a philosopher is the capacity for wonder. Babies have this capacity, but most people become inured to life and no longer find it wonderful. Philosophers are different from others, and the philosopher writing the letters wants Sophie to never lose her sense of wonder.
• Myths: A day later, after school, Sophie finds a letter from her dad, working far away, and then another on philosophy. This letter describes the situation leading up to the beginning of western philosophy. Before the Greek philosophers, people explained life through myths—stories about the gods. But the early Greek philosophers questioned the myths and began looking for other explanations for why the world is the way it is. Sophie thinks about this and realizes that making up stories to explain the workings of nature is not so far-fetched, for she would do the same if she did not already have other explanations.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Jostein Gaarder (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Kirsten Vagn Jensen (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• BBC's Big Read (April 2003, #175)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 839.82374

Notes for Parents edit see section history

This could be a tough book to understand for children under high school. Many of the people mentioned are people that have been mentioned in high school history courses. Also since the philosopher is talking to a fourteen year old girl it could make it a bit difficult for younger children.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science › History & Philosophy › History of Science
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Historical
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Sofies Verden (IMDb): (1999)

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history