The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics

Steven E. Landsburg

Nov 2009 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

In the wake of his enormously popular books The Armchair Economist and More Sex Is Safer Sex, 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?

Widely renowned for his lively explorations of economics, in his fourth book Landsburg branches out into mathematics and physics as well—disciplines that, like economics, the author loves for their beauty, their logical clarity, and their profound and indisputable truth—to take us on a provocative and utterly entertaining journey through the questions that have preoccupied philosophers through the ages. The author begins with the broadest possible categories—Reality and Unreality; Knowledge and Belief; Right and Wrong—and then focuses his exploration on specific concerns: 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.

Ratings and reviews

Good reasoning and bad reasoning mixed into an annoying hodge-podge. His argument that we use ESP to do mathematics is flat out wrong. The human mind has the power to abstract from the concrete - you don't need to add a fairy tale like ESP to explain it. (It seems he's using Plato's Myth of the Cave to explain math instead of empirical objects.) I can take the boilerplate atheism, nothing new there. There is a total lack of moral perspective or consideration that makes many of his arguments seem weird, or perhaps I should say one-dimensional. And his proof that prime numbers are infinite makes sense at first (multiplying primes and then adding 1 would generate another prime number by making the primes multiplied together an odd number), but what if that odd number is a 5? Then the proof fails. I could not find any sure way around this, but perhaps some mathematician with more than my meager skills could.

This is a general introduction to mathematical economics which also tries to simplify answers to “…the big questions of philosophy: Where did the universe come from? Why is there something instead of nothing? How is knowledge possible? What justifies a belief? How can we tell right from wrong, and good from evil? How should we live our lives?” An economists’ golden rule (EGR) is proposed to compare cost-benefits for both others and self. Frank Ramsey is author’s favorite philosopher. Also recommends Tegmark’s paper on “The Mathematical Universe” where physics is mathematics and human-semantic-type baggage, able to show isomorphism between external reality and mathematical structures. Some discussion of consciousness and AI emphasizes Dennett. The book does not cover controversial topics and the blog characterizes the recent crisis as “just another bank run, pure and simple”. Reader would seek additional sources for topics such as behavioral economics, emotions, history and types of philosophies, analysis of scarcity, investing, ecommerce, debt or solutions for alternative economics.

About the author

Steven E. Landsburg is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. He is the author of More Sex Is Safer Sex and The Big Questions. He has written for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. He lives in Rochester, New York.