
Philosophical Essays
1710 · 366 pages
Reality is made of monads, mind-like simple substances with no windows, whose perceptions God synchronized in advance. His conclusion that ours is the optimal world drew Voltaire's ridicule in Candide.
★ 6.3

Reality is made of monads, mind-like simple substances with no windows, whose perceptions God synchronized in advance. His conclusion that ours is the optimal world drew Voltaire's ridicule in Candide.

Awaiting execution, Boethius is visited by a woman called Philosophy, who explains why fortune's wheel turns and how God's foreknowledge still leaves you free. Medieval Europe read nothing more closely.

Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.