"Sophie's World" notes on Chapters 1-4

1. Chapter 1- The Garden of Eden

1.1. Sophie receives a letter in the mail.

1.1.1. New node

1.2. "It contained only a slip of paper no bigger than the envelope. It read 'Who are you?'" (Gaarder 4).

1.3. Sophie doesn't know who she really is. She goes into the bathroom and looks at herself and talks to herself in the mirror and this confuses her.

1.4. Sophie also starts to think a lot about why she looks the way she does and why she didn't have any say in her appearance. She also starts to wonder what will happen after she dies.

1.5. She finds another letter in the mailbox. "Where does the world come from? it said" (Gaarder 7).

1.6. This letter makes Sophie think because she knows that everything that has ever existed has to have had some starting point.

1.7. Sophie receives a birthday card in the mail addressed to "Hilde." This confuses her because she doesn't know why someone would purposely send their daughter a birthday card to the wrong place.

2. Chapter 4- The Natural Philosophies

2.1. Sophie got another letter that had three more questions. "Is there a basic substance that everything else is made of? Can water turn into wine? How can earth and water produce a live frog?" (Gaarder 31).

2.2. Sophie spent a lot of time wondering about these questions. She knew that Jesus had turned water into wine but she never thought about it literally.

2.3. The next letter says it is a good idea to try and figure out what each philosopher's project is and what they are trying to figure out. It then makes it easier to follow the philosopher's line of thought.

2.4. The philosopher's believed that there had to be something or a substance that everything came from and returned to. Philosophy developed out of religion and eventually grew to science.

2.5. The first philosopher we know of is Thales, who came from Miletus. He thought that the source of everything was water and he thought about how it froze, vaporized and turned to water again.

2.6. The next philosopher is Anaximander, who lived in Miletus about the same time as Thales. He believed that the substance that is the source of all things had to be something other then what was created.

2.7. Another philosopher from Miletus, Anaximenes thought that the source of all things must be "air" or "vapor".

2.8. Parmenides thought that everything that exists had always existed. He is a rationalist which is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.

2.8.1. Heraclitus thought that constant change was the most basic characteristic of nature.

2.9. Sophie "decided that philosophy was not something you can learn; but perhaps you can learn to think philosophically" (Gaarder 42).

3. Chapter 2- The Top Hat

3.1. Sophie isn't interested anymore in games like badminton or cards and she can't focus on school anymore because she feels that these questions about life are way more important.

3.2. When Sophie gets home from school she goes and looks in the mailbox and finds another letter addressed to her.

3.3. The letter talks about Philosophy and how there will always be something that everyone needs. Everyone also needs to figure out who they are and why they are here as well.

3.4. She recieves another letter again that says "The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder" (Gaarder 17). As we get older, our reactions to certain situations change because the world becomes habit.

3.5. When Sophie's mother gets home from work that night, Sophie asks her about life and the earth. Her mother is so taken back by this and she asks Sophie if she is taking drugs.

4. Chapter 3- The Myths

4.1. Myths are stories about the gods which set out to explain why life is as it is. These myths were handed down from generation to generation through religious explanations.

4.2. Once the myths were in written form by Homer and Hesoid, it created a whole new situation because the could now be discussed.

4.3. Reading about all of the myths in the letter about weather makes Sophie wonder how to explain how it randomly just starts to rain or where the snow goes.

4.4. These myths were thought of before science existed and Sophie decides to forget about all of the science she learns at school.