Review by C.J. Bunce

In 1991, Norwegian teacher Jostein Gaarder resolved to find an innovative way to teach the history of philosophy.  He did it by looking at philosophy in a different way.  Through the eyes of a teenager named Sophie he taught readers about the questions humans have asked themselves for thousands of years.  His avant garde approach was the novel Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy.  Gaarder allowed the book to be further molded to reach its audience in another way, and in 2022 a graphic novel was released in an English edition by publisher Self Made Hero.  We reviewed the first volume here at borg.  The second and final volume of Sophie’s World: A Graphic Novel About the History of Philosophy has arrived, and it’s available now here at Amazon.  As stuffy as philosophy may sound, this not boring stuff, but the kind of eye-opening history that will make you re-think about your political views and your own role in making the world better.

It’s a big task to translate a book of dense ideas into pictures, so writer Vincent Zabus and the artist known as Nicoby broke it in two.  The first volume of this graphic approach took readers from the earliest philosophers to Socrates and then on to Galileo.  The second takes readers from Descartes to the present day.

As with all aspects of studying history, the history of thought overlaps with other disciplines, and that comes through here as Sophie grows in her understanding of history, natural law, and reasoning, the history of religion, and the history of science, but also how she–and in turn, readers–can apply philosophical principles in understanding why activism against dangers that threaten existence should be addressed by each one of us.

The book continues Sophie’s journey in understanding her own thoughts and feelings about life, religion, and politics, fleshing out larger topics that a student of philosophy would dig into much deeper working on a college degree.  So this is merely an overview, but it’s simple enough for anyone about second grade and upward to understand.  Volume 1 examined the place of Socrates in philosophy as its founding father, moving along to Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus and Hellenism, taking readers through the Romanesque thought of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance view of the 17th century and the Baroque view of the 18th century.

The second volume begins with René Descartes and the Rationalists, taking a step back to the 17th century and Descartes’ method for a philosophical system.  Along with Sophie’s professor Alberto, historical figures step in to share their ideas.  She moves on to Spinoza’s view of what it is to be free and the role of personal responsibility, then to empiracists John Locke and David Hume, and George Berkeley and consciousness.  Tracking any good second semester college political science course, Sophie moves on to addressing Thomas Hobbes, and law and order under mankind’s social contract, discussed in his book Leviathan, and expounded upon by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment of the 18th century is next, followed by 19th century Romanticists, Hegel and Kierkegaard, leading into Karl Marx and dialectical materialism, and ending with natural selection with Charles Darwin, the id from Sigmund Freud, and existentialism by way of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Camus.

An addition to this volume is a meta adventure by Sophie, as she tries to leave the confines of the book itself with the aid of the author’s daughter Hilde.

Here is a look inside the book:

The book discusses many topics, wrestling with ideas like verifiable truths, reason and rational thought, the soul, good and evil, and the foundations of political philosophy as well as religion, including faith and reason, knowledge and belief.

It’s not a substitute for an actual philosophy text or history, but like the first volume it’s likely to spark interest in the subject of philosophy and it’s a good overview of the history of thought and belief–a revisit to subjects from grade school and college for those who paid attention, and a wake-up call for those who sat in the back of the class throwing spitballs at each other.  Pick up the first volume of the enlightening Sophie’s World: A Graphic Novel About the History of Philosophy and Sophie’s World: A Graphic Novel About the History of Philosophy Volume 2 available now here at Amazon.