A brief history of the paradox : philosophy and the labyrinths of the mind / Roy Sorensen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sorensen, Roy A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Paradox.

Paradoxes.

Physical Description:

xv, 394 pages : illustrations ; 19 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.

Summary:

The first narrative history of paradoxes explores how the greatest minds have grappled with the most puzzling problems Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums-for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before He made the world, he was told: "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with such thinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W. V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken toward these puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor.

Contents:

1 Anaximander and the Riddle of Origin 1

2 Pythagoras's Search for the Common Denominator 19

3 Parmenides on What Is Not 28

4 Sisyphus's Rock and Zeno's Paradoxes 44

5 Socrates: The Paradox of Inquiry 58

6 The Megarian Identity Crisis 71

7 Eubulides and the Politics of the Liar 83

8 A Footnote to "Plato" 100

9 Aristotle on Fatalism 116

10 Chrysippus on People Parts 130

11 Sextus Empiricus and the Infinite Regress of Justification 148

12 Augustine's Pragmatic Paradoxes 162

13 Aquinas: Can God Have a Biography? 177

14 Ockham and the Insolubilia 187

15 Buridan's Sophisms 200

16 Pascal's Improbable Calculations 216

17 Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason 237

18 Hume's All-Consuming Ideas 252

19 The Common Sense of Thomas Reid 268

20 Kant and the Antinomy of Pure Reason 284

21 Hegel's World of Contradictions 303

22 Russell's Set 316

23 Wittgenstein and the Depth of a Grammatical Joke 333

24 Quine's Question Mark 349.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [373]-380) and index.

ISBN:

0195159039

OCLC:

51969109