Wow! eBook
The Big Questions: Tackling The Problems Of Philosophy With Ideas From Mathematics, Economics, And Physics Reprint Edition
Author(s): Steven E. Landsburg (Author)
- Publisher: Free Press
- Publication Date: 19 Oct. 2010
- Edition: Reprint
- Language: English
- Print length: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 1439148228
- ISBN-13: 9781439148228
Book Description
Beginning with the broadest philosophical issuestheories of existence, knowledge, and ethicsLandsburg then turns to a dazzling variety of specific applications. He gives us a mathematical analysis for arguments for the existence of God; explains the real meanings of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Gdels incompleteness theorem; and carefully dissects the meaning of social responsibility on the playground, in the marketplace, and in the voting booth.
Stimulating, illuminating, and always surprising,
The Big Questions reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.Editorial Reviews
Review
“In “The Big Questions”, Steven Landsburg ventures far beyond his usual domain to take on questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. . . . [T]his must make Steven Landsburg history’s most courageous mathematician because for Landsburg mathematical abstractions are not like Mount Everest, rather Mount Everest is a mathematical abstraction. Indeed, for Landsburg, it’s math all the way down–math is what exists and what exists is math, A=A. Read the book for more on this view, which is as good as any metaphysics that has ever been and a far sight better than most.” — MarginalRevolution.com
“Steven E. Landsburg’s latest book of economic brain teasers resembles one of those Hanayama metal puzzles that you’re supposed to pull apart: They drive me crazy, yet I can’t put them down. Landsburg is the University of Rochester professor who brought us “The Armchair Economist” and “More Sex Is Safer Sex”…. In “The Big Questions”, he attempts something more ambitious and slightly less flip: to sum up his ideas about ‘the nature of reality, the basis of knowledge and the foundations of ethics.”‘ Be prepared for a diverting journey into the maze of one man’s mind, a supply-and-demand version of the movie “Being John Malkovich.” — “Bloomburg News”
