Insurmountable Simplicities: 39 Philosophical Conundrums

Bite-sized bits of thought-provoking philosophy are cunningly explored in this little book of brainteasers. Philosopher-authors Casati and Varzi use playlets, short fiction and imagined correspondence to explore philosophical conundrums ranging from time travel to the sinister ways mirrors work. The prose tends toward the roundabout (""Cause and Time are addressed, including whether it is reasonable to build a machine to travel back into the Past, and whether, by traveling back into the Past, one could induce changes in the Present"") in the introductions to such Twilight Zone-esque scenarios as ""Playing Lotto in Reverse City,"" where lottery tickets are free and most allow players to earn one dollar (though the possibility exists that a player will have to pay $1 million), and ""Row 13,"" in which naming a building's 13th floor something else doesn't change the fact that it's the 13th floor. And though the script format the authors deploy is clever, the dialogue is cumbersomely campy, if not frequently obtuse (One argument features characters ""talking about up/down, left/right, and front/back in a completely different sense, with reference to the external space.""). Fun and best digested in small doses, this collection of paradoxes will stimulate its share of head-scratching.