Philosophy advances, on the whole, by asking simple questions that have unexpectedly difficult answers. When it turns out that a plausible argument leads from apparently sensible premises to an absurd or contradictory result, philosophers descend on it in droves, and sometimes spend multiple millennia trying to work out what has gone wrong. This is — as Terry Pratchett liked to point out — bad news for tortoises and for the reputation of Cretans, but at least it creates work for Athenian shipwrights...

Of course, the result is that in writing a "history of the paradox" directed at general readers, Roy Sorensen has ended up simply putting a slightly new spin on the traditional Anaximander-to-Wittgenstein narrative of western philosophy. It's different enough in its approach that you won't be bored if you've already worked your way through one or two similar histories (I read Anthony Kenny's book a few years ago), but it doesn't cover very much really unfamiliar ground. Sorensen is quite brisk and lively, covering the ground in under 400 pages, and he sticks to the point without going off into the usual digressions into the private lives of the philosophers. (We do get the G H Hardy taxi anecdote, but there seems to be a strict rule that that has to be included in all popular philosophy and pure-maths texts...) ( )

As you would expect, this book is difficult reading, especially if you really try to comprehend each side of every paradox. It is also difficult to follow thousands of years of history as the concept of paradox evolved. However, Sorensen makes the adventure more interesting and enjoyable by sprinkling in historical anecdotes such as the suspicions that Kant was suffering from a prefrontal lobe tumor because his Critique of Pure Reason was incomprehensible to some. Sorenson’s writing is clear and expressive. One passage I found humorously ironic was, “Severely retarded sufferers of “chatterbox syndrome” have normal, even overdeveloped, linguistic faculties that enable them to pass as hypersophisticated conversationalists. They use big words.” ( )

I was disappointed in this book. I thought it would be an in depth discussion on paradoxes, but rather it was about the history of them. Paradoxically, if I had studied the title carefully, I probably would have realized what I was getting into. Ha. ( )