The Big Questions

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 Bid Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.

ISBN 143914821X   Pages 288 ISBN13 9781439148211 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Simon & Schuster   Weight (grammes) 390 Imprint The Free Press   Published in New York Format Hardback   Height (mm) 216 Publication date 26 Nov 2009   Width (mm) 135 Library of Congress HB72   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY 100   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

"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

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