the brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky

S'il n'existait pas Dieu, il faudrait l'inventer. You know, dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenthĬentury who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be 'Joking? I was told at the elder's yesterday that I was joking. Here is the relevant passage copied from : The discussion is longer than this short loose translation, and the interested reader can easily find these passages in Chapter III, 'The Brothers get to know each other.' All these questions are posed in our three dimensions.in fact, let parallel lines meet, let me even see that they meet, but even then I will not understand it.' Hence, Alyosha, I would advise you to not even think about whether God exists. But if he did, then there is a problem, as there are geometers and philosophers today, including some remarkable ones, who put into doubt this Euclidean geometry, who can come up with systems that do not appear on the earth, and are not understandable to most of us. Now, if God created man, the question is whether he created him according to Euclidean geometry, with an understanding of only three dimensions. Although he does not use the word 'Lobachevsky', the reference was clear for his readers at that time, as Ivan says, roughly:'Did God create man or did man create God? The axioms of the usual Russian is the former, but I respect both hypotheses. The importance to the literate Russians was not the philosophical points, but that a Russian had toppled this great German, since the general assumption in European philosophy were that the Germans were the greats and the Russians mere provincials, mere peasants of the philosophical world. Lobachevsky himself did not understand the import of his work when he came out with it, but others quickly pointed out that the results (along with those of Bolyai) showed that the main example upon which Immanuel Kant had based his main thesis in his masterwork 'Critique of Pure Reason' (thesis: that there were a priori synthetic truths example: the sum of the angles of a triangle adding up to a half-circle) was false, hence the thesis was false. For more detailed information, I turn to David Reid who first wrote to suggest that this work be added to my list:ĭostoevsky was an avid newspaper reader, and one of the things that made the headlines in the Russian press (for the small percentage of literate Russians at the time) was the consequences of Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean Geometry. Although the theme is not explicitly carried throughout the rest of the novel, it plays an important role by bringing into doubt the idea of objective morality which the `truth' of Euclid was meant to support. In this classic final masterwork by Dostoevsky, the existence of non-Euclidean geometry is mentioned at one point. (click on names to see more mathematical fiction A list compiled by Alex Kasman ( College of Charleston)

The brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky