If you want to learn how to conform to confound, raze hopes, succeed your successor, order absence in the absence of order, win by losing and think contrapositively, look no further. Here you can unlock the secrets of Plato's void, Wittgenstein's investigations, Schopenhauer's intelligence test, Voltaire's big bet, Russell's slip of the pen and lobster logic. Among your discoveries will be why the egg came before the chicken, what the dishwasher missed and just what it was that made Descartes disappear. Experience the unbearable lightness of logical conclusions in Professor Sorensen's intriguing cabinet of riddles, problems, paradoxes, puzzles and the anomalies of human utterance. As you accompany him on investigations into the mysteries of truth, falsehood, reason and delusion, prepare to be surprised, enlightened, mystified and, above all, entertained.

A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities is a collection of puzzles, paradoxes, riddles, and miscellaneous logic problems. Depending on taste, one can partake of a puzzle, a poem, a proof, or a pun.

If you want to learn how to conform to confound, raze hopes, succeed your successor, order absence in the absence of order, win by losing and think contrapositively, look no further. Here you can unlock the secrets of Plato's void, Wittgenstein's investigations, Schopenhauer's intelligence test, Voltaire's big bet, Russell's slip of the pen and lobster logic. Among your discoveries will be why the egg came before the chicken, what the dishwasher missed, and just what it was that made Descartes disappear. Experience the unbearable lightness of logical conclusions in Professor Sorensen's intriguing cabinet of riddles, problems, paradoxes, puzzles and the anomalies of human utterance. As you accompany him on investigations into the mysteries of truth, falsehood, reason and delusion, prepare to be surprised, enlightened, mystified and, above all, entertained.

A miscellany of odd stories and facts about the ancient Greeks, demonstrating how much they were--and were not--like us.

About the fifth century BC, three civilizations independently and simultaneously began to philosophize about nothing: China (chapter 3), India (chapters 4 and 5), and Greece (chapters 6-10). They had previously focused on what is the case. Light poured on nature, architecture, and society. But then, in a cross-civilizational black-out, emerged disparate nay-sayers who shifted attention to what is not the case. Behold, the holes in a sponge are absences of sponge! Holes are what make the sponge useful for absorbing liquid. The sponge can exist without the holes. But the holes cannot "exist" without the sponge. They are parasites that depend on their host. Yet the two get along well. Without holes, there would not be so many sponges in your house. Your shadow is a more complex parasite. It is a hole you bore into the light. Your shadow depends on both you and the light. You and light are rather mysterious. Your shadow partakes of both mysteries. .

Roy Sorensen here defends the causal theory of perception by treating absences as causes. He draws heavily on common sense and psychology to vindicate the assumption that we directly perceive absences.

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.

Inference to the Best Explanation is an unrivalled exposition of a theory of particular interest to students both of epistemology and the philosophy of science.

'Curiosity' and 'wonder' are topics of increasing interest and importance to Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Conspicuous in a host of disciplines from history of science and technology to history of art, literature, and society, both have assumed a prominent place in studies of the Early Modern period. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to investigate the various manifestations of, and relationships between, 'curiosity' and 'wonder' from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Focused case studies on texts, objects and individuals explore the multifaceted natures of these themes, highlighting the intense fascination and continuing scrutiny to which each has been subjected over three centuries. From instances of curiosity in New World exploration to the natural wonders of 18th-century Italy, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment locates its subjects in a broad geographical and disciplinary terrain. Taken together, the essays presented here construct a detailed picture of two complex themes, demonstrating the extent to which both have been transformed and reconstituted, often with dramatic results.

A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey’s finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously—especially in an era of fake news—ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures—from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists—Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from “bad” ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution.