Showing results for "Micromegas, historia filosófica" in All Categories

If we were as tiny as ants to another being, what would they make of our philosophies? The great satirist Voltaire imagines alien visitors who have opinions. Bedtime stories are narrated by the world's most celebrated voices and written with no beginning, middle, or end so you don't stay up to hear what happens next. They're interesting enough to give your mind something to focus on, but delivered in a way that encourages sleep.

"Dans une de ces planètes qui tournent autour de l'étoile nommée Sirius, il y avait un jeune homme de beaucoup d'esprit, que j'ai eu l'honneur de connaître dans le dernier voyage qu'il fit sur notre petite fourmilière ; il s'appelait Micromégas, nom qui convient fort à tous les grands. Il avait huit lieues de haut : j'entends, par huit lieues, vingt-quatre mille pas géométriques de cinq pieds chacun."

We hear that we must be passionate about only one thing, that 10,000 hours of hard practice is needed to achieve mastery. But in fact most successful people, including Nobel Prize winners, nurture multiple areas of knowledge and activity that feed their central subject. Whether it's making a perfect soufflé, dancing a tango or lighting a fire, when we take the time to cultivate small and quantifiable areas of expertise, we change everything.

Forget spending 10,000 hours in the pursuit of perfecting just one thing. The true path to success and achievement lies in the pursuit of perfecting lots and lots of small things - for a big payoff. Combining positive psychology, neuroscience, self-help and more, this delightfully illuminating book encourages us to circumvent all the reasons we "can't" learn and grow (we're too busy, it's too complicated, we're not experts, we didn't start when we were young) - by tackling small, satisfying skills.

First published in 1752, "Micromegas" is one of Voltaire’s best-known works. It is a tale of mordant irony, and actually the original science-fiction short story. Arriving on Earth from the star Sirius, the gigantic explorer Micromegas discovers the people of Earth, so small compared to him that he first believes that no creature this size can hope to achieve any degree of intelligence; he will soon discover the ways and thoughts of these diminutive people, who clearly have an over-inflated idea of their own importance in the universe. Voltaire's extrapolations of sun-powered interstellar flight, alien civilizations, and the two moons of Mars, are designed to make us see ourselves in a new light and laugh at what we find.

Something between a tale and a polemic, these 'fables of reason' are feats of narrative compression and contain much of Voltaire's best and funniest writing. From ribald tales of adultery to conversations between cosmic travellers, the stories in this collection pose moral, philosophical and social questions. Listener and protagonist alike find their assumptions challenged as Voltaire mingles rationality and fantasy.