How would Plato have responded if his student Aristotle had ever challenged his idea that our
senses perceive nothing more than the shadows cast upon a wall by a true world of perfect
ideals? What would Charles Darwin have said to Karl Marx about his claim that dialectical
materialism is a scientific theory of evolution? How would Jean-Paul Sartre have reacted to
Simone de Beauvoir's claim that the Marquis de Sade was a philosopher worthy of serious
attention? This light-hearted book proposes answers to such questions by imagining dialogues
between thirty-three pairs of philosophical sages who were alive at the same time. Sometime
famous sages get a much rougher handling than usual as when Adam Smith beards Immanuel Kant in
his Konigsberg den. Sometimes neglected or maligned sages get a chance to say what they really
believed as when Epicurus explains that he wasn't epicurean. Sometimes the dialogues are about
the origins of modern concepts as when Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat discuss their
invention of probability or when John Nash and John von Neumann discuss the creation of game
theory. Even in these scientific cases the intention is that the protagonists come across as
fallible human beings like the rest of us rather than the intellectual paragons of
philosophical textbooks.
