Description: A series of letters between a professor of philosophy and an eleven-year-old girl.
Brief description:
Vittorio Hösle is Paul G. Kimball Chair of Arts and Letters in the Department of German Languages and Literatures and concurrent professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame. He was the founding director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and a Hermeneutics (2012) and Morals and Politics (2004), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.
Review Quotes:
"Hösle (Univ. of Essen, Germany, and Univ. of Notre Dame, Indiana) presents two years of correspondence between himself and an 11- to 13- year-old girl identified as Nora K. Nora received a copy of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World (Eng., 1994); when Hösle first met her, she asked whether the Platonic idea of the dinosaur had ceased to exist, since there are no living dinosaurs. In a thank you note for a marzipan dinosaur present from Hösle, she mentioned that Aristotle's conception of women made her made. Hösle responded with a letter describing the "Cafe of the Dead but Ever Young Philosophers." where the philosophers Gaarder mentioned were encountered arguing among themselves. Nora was quick to play along with the fantasy, and 56 letters ensued. There is much of interest in the letters, but it is easy to miss the point of this book. A better beginning might have been prefaced by Nora; only late does Hösle reveal his intention: "What is new, and perhaps unique, about the present work is that it contains the philosohy of a child" rather than philosophy about children. Hösle ends with an insightful commentary but risks losing readers by failing to say earlier why and how they should attend to the exchange. Recommended; all levels." --Choice