Stuff
Product Details
Free Press, November 2009
Hardcover, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 143914821X
ISBN-13: 9781439148211
Description
In the wake of his enormously popular books The Armchair Economist and More Sex Is Safer Sex, Slate columnist and Economics professor Steven Landsburg uses concepts from mathematics, economics, and physics to address the big questions in philosophy: What is real? What can we know? What is the difference between right and wrong? And how should we live? Landsburg begins with the broadest possible categories from a mathematical analysis of the arguments for the existence of God; to the real meaning of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Godel Incompleteness Theorem; to the moral choices we face in the marketplace and the voting booth. Stimulating, illuminating, and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.
"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
"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
"The Big Questions is a funky book, like an intellectual roller coaster ride through some of the most fascinating ideas in science, math and economics. These are the ideas, says the author - a University of Rochester professor of economics - that unlock the most perplexing mysteries in philosophy and life, in general. His book is a thought provoking blast."
-- David Henderson
National Review, December 30, 2009
... In an NRO column this month I said some unkind things — along with some kind ones — about Steven Landsburg’s new book The Big Questions . Steven is a total open-borders proponent, one of those people willing to find out how ...
Steven E. Landsburg's Books
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More Sex Is Safer SexEconomics is no longer the "dismal science" dreaded by college freshmen. In recent years, a band of economists has broken away from the charts and...Read More
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