So far in Sophie's World, there has been a lot of interesting topics brought up that I have never really though about. Out of everything I've read, the early pages are some of the most interesting to me. In the very beginning, the protagonist is given questions including "Who are you?' and "Why are you here?'. These questions phased me quite a bit, since they are such simple questions, they should be able to have simple answers. But they don't. It is nearly impossible to to answer the question of who you are with all the ways people define themselves (gender, sexuality, political stance, activities they partake in, family or religious titles, etc.) and nobody really knows why we are here. These seemingly simple questions, along with many others, make myself wonder how much of our existence and our world's existence do we truly understand. Only a few pages later, Sophie scrutinizes herself in the mirror, trying to understand who she is. I'm not going to lie of done this before; trying to examine the identical me and trying to out move the other Hank. However, I never really saw this in a philosophical way, just some random interest. Now, while doing this same act, ideas of alternate universes, ideas of other me's, and just the question of "Who am I?" all run through my head. Of what we have read so far, I have had to sit back and reexamine everything on multiple occasions, and that is why  Philosophy (and this novel) is so cool to me.

Hank Peters-Wood