This Book Does Not Exist:
Adventures in the Paradoxical
By Gary Hayden and Michael Picard
‘If there is an exception to every rule, then every rule must have at least one exception — except this one.’
Welcome to the world of the paradox – something that appears to be true and yet contradicts itself. From Galileo’s Fan to the Cone of Democritus, and from the impossibility of motion to the infinite staircase, these mind-bending thought experiments, optical illusions and logical deceptions are on of the most interesting and accessible facets of philosophy.
This Book Does Not Exist will stretch your mind, put your neurons through their paces, and challenge the foundations of your knowledge and opinions. You’ll discover that you can’t even trust your own senses – even though they may be all you have. Filled with puzzles that have intrigued the greatest philosophers, this fascinating collection of insoluble logical paradoxes will give your intellect a workout that you can’t help but enjoy.
This is Not a Book, has been translated into:
FRENCH
SWEDISH
DUTCH
Purchase This Book does Not Exist from:
Revised and expanded as (The Bedside Book of) Paradoxes (2013). Translated into multiple European languages, it has sold over 150,000 copies worldwide.
Here is a sample chapter written by Picard: Ch7_Impossibilities.
Here are more comments about CAFE PHILOSOPHY and the essays written for them:
“Thank you for the pleasure of attending another one of your most enjoyable, informative, and mentally stimulating sessions of the Philosophers’ Café. Perhaps the most precious attribute we each possess, to varying degrees, of course, for whatever reason, is a sacred spark of intelligence. I can easily imagine you in some earlier lifetime, wearing the mask of a spiritual guru, intentionally, to protect yourself and your tens of thousands of worshipping followers, who gathered to learn, from you, how to ignite, develop, care for, and then to share with others the sacred gift of learning to think, about themselves, the world they live in and then how to live in such as way as to themselves become a credit to their teacher. Sincerely, Jean Whitred” 12/10/2013
“I wanted to offer congratulations to you on the 500th cafe session. This is a remarkable milestone, and you deserve enormous credit for the longstanding success at providing a public forum for discussion here in Victoria. I think it must be at least eight years since I first attended, at that time hosted by Bean Around the World. I feel my personal thought processes,, opinions, values, and ideas and the ability for me to form and express these have been greatly influenced by attendance at Cafe Philosophy. […]” — Eileen de Verteuil 13/09/2008
“You have developed a marvelously uncanny way of being able to reframe some of our most mundane utterances and render them brilliant. This is a message of encouragement for and appreciation of your wonderful philosophy outreach program, including the consistent and clever prodding of those many of us, who are hungrily reaching out to continue the expansion of our thought processes, with the least possible effort. It is with gratitude that I attend, whenever possible, … Sincerely, AnneMarie Stewart.” 09/03/2008