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.