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.
Editorial Reviews
"The Big Questions is one of the strangest and most compelling books I've ever read. Whatever you think and believe about any one of dozens of the biggest questions in life, be prepared to have your deepest presuppositions challenged and your most cherished beliefs shaken, if not overturned. Landsburg fearlessly wades into icons and ideologies with fresh insights Ive encountered nowhere else. Landsburg's mind is like a bizarre amalgam of Gödel, Escher, and Borat, with a little Wiggentsin thrown in for good measure. I'll buy a beer for anyone who can read this book and not be stunned by its originality." -Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Mind of the Market
About the Author
Steven E. Landsburg is a Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. He is the author of The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, More Sex is Safer Sex, The Big Questions, two textbooks in economics, a forthcoming textbook on general relativity and cosmology, and over 30 journal articles in mathematics, economics and philosophy. His current research is in the area of quantum game theory. He blogs daily at www.TheBigQuestions.com. For over ten years, he wrote the monthly "Everyday Economics" column in Slate magazine, and has written regularly for Forbesand occasionally for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He appeared as a commentator on the PBS/Turner Broadcasting series "Damn Right", and has made over 200 appearances on radio and television broadcasts over the past few years.
