Mom’s Choice Award Winner!

Phil the philosophy monkey and Soph the tiger set off on a journey to discover the nature of identity in this creative and dynamic graphic novel written as an interactive adventure book.

Are you the same person you were yesterday? How about last week? Last year? When you were born? You don’t look the same. You don’t sound the same. You don’t necessarily like the same foods or have the same friends or enjoy the same activities. It would seem that you can’t be the same person. And yet is there something about you that makes you you, even when everything else has changed? Would you recognize yourself from ten years ago? Ten years from now? Does something in you stay the same? If it does, what is it?

Philosophers all over the world and in every age have sought to answer these questions, and many of them have come up with different ideas and theories, beliefs and philosophies. Phil and Soph explore the philosophical theories about identity and time of twenty-three different eminent Eastern and Middle Eastern philosophers as they travel in time from place to place, trying to unravel the mystery of whether or not their hammock from an earlier time is the same as the hammock they have today. They went back and brought the hammock from the past with them to the present, so now they have two hammocks, but it’s the same hammock, just from two different times, so…how many hammocks do they really have?

To complicate matters, during the course of their time traveling, they inadvertently break time, leading to two Phils and two Sophs, a past version and a present version. Who’s who? Are they the same? Are they different? Only the wisdom of the philosophers can help them to decide and get back to the correct time.

Perhaps the best part of this stunningly illustrated book is that readers get to choose which theories to follow and then turn to the pages where the philosophers who espoused those theories explain them. In that way, this book offers something different every time someone reads it…which means it’s a different book each time…except it’s the same book. Actually, maybe we should ask Phil and Soph about that.