Contents
1 The Man Who Asked Questions 1
Socrates and Plato
2 True Happiness 9
Aristotle
3 We Know Nothing 15
Pyrrho
4 The Garden Path 22
Epicurus
5 Learning Not to Care 28
Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca
6 Who Is Pulling Our Strings? 34
Augustine
7 The Consolation of Philosophy 40
Boethius
8 The Perfect Island 46
The Fox and the Lion 51
Niccolò Machiavelli
Nasty, Brutish, and Short 57
Thomas Hobbes
Could You Be Dreaming? 62
René Descartes
Place Your Bets 69
Blaise Pascal
The Lens Grinder 76
Baruch Spinoza
The Prince and the Cobbler 81
John Locke and Thomas Reid
The Elephant in the Room 87
George Berkeley (and John Locke)
The Best of All Possible Worlds? 93
Voltaire and Gottfried Leibniz
The Imaginary Watchmaker 99
David Hume
Born Free 105
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rose-Tinted Reality 110
Immanuel Kant (i)
What if Everyone Did That? 115
The Owl of Minerva Georg W.F. Hegel
Glimpses of Reality Arthur Schopenhauer
Space to Grow John Stuart Mill
Unintelligent Design Charles Darwin
Life’s Sacrifices Soren Kierkegaard
Workers of the World Unite Karl Marx
So What?
C.S. Peirce and William James
The Death of God Friedrich Nietzsche
Thoughts in Disguise Sigmund Freud
Is the Present King of France Bald?
Bertrand Russell
Boo!/Hooray!
A.J. Ayer
The Anguish of Freedom
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and
Albert Camus
34 Bewitched by Language 202
Ludwig Wittgenstein
35 The Man Who Didn’t Ask Questions 208
Hannah Arendt
36 Learning from Mistakes 214
Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn
37 The Runaway Train and the Unwanted Violinist 222
Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson
38 Fairness Through Ignorance 228
John Rawls
39 Can Computers Think? 234
Alan Turing and John Searle
40 A Modern Gadfly