Or Perhaps He Knows Not — 12 Arguments to Read Before You Trust Your Own Mind (PDF + EPUB)

A stick put into water looks bent. Everyone knows it is not bent, and everyone knows how they know: they pulled it out and looked. But notice what did the correcting. The eye reported the bend. The eye then reported the straightness. The instrument that was wrong is the instrument that ruled on its own error.

Twelve writers, across twenty-three centuries, followed that thought as far as it goes. Each arrived at the same wall — the mind checking the mind — and each said plainly that he had not got past it. This book puts them in one order, in four movements, and lets them talk.

Twelve arguments, in four movements:

The senses — Zhuangzi, The Adjustment of Controversies (4th c. BC, tr. Legge); al-Ghazālī, The Subterfuges of the Sophists* (c. 1107, tr. Field); Descartes, Of the Things of which We may Doubt (1641, tr. Veitch).

The reason — Hume, Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding (1748); Mill, Of the Ground of Induction (1843); Lewis Carroll, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895).

The self — the Kena Upanishad (tr. Max Müller); Augustine, Confessions, Book XI (c. 400, tr. Pusey); William James, The Methods and Snares of Psychology* (1890).

The circle — Berkeley, *The Author's Introduction (1710); Kant, Preface to the Second Edition (1787, tr. Meiklejohn); Poincaré, The Classical Mechanics (1902).

And a coda, printed last: the seven verses of the *Nāsadīya Sūkta* (Ṛgveda X.129, tr. Griffith), older than everything before it, which end on the line the book is named for.

The writers do not agree. Descartes thinks the wall has a door; Hume thinks we walk through it every morning on habit; Zhuangzi wakes up unsure which side he is on. That disagreement is the point. This is not a book that tells you what to believe. It is a book of the best reasons ever given for holding your beliefs a little more loosely.

What you get

- Or Perhaps He Knows Not — Designed Edition (PDF). 180 pages, 129 × 198 mm, set in Abril Fatface and EB Garamond on a warm printed-paper ground, with four colour movements and twelve drawn openers. Made for reading on a laptop or tablet, or for printing.

- Or Perhaps He Knows Not (EPUB). A clean, reflowable edition for Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and phones. Passes EPUBCheck with no errors.

Instant download. DRM-free. Yours to keep and move between devices.

A note on the edition

All twelve texts and the coda are in the public domain, in the translations named on their openers. They were set from documented sources — a checksum for every file is printed in the source notes — and the three texts that came from scanned books were proofed against the page images, not taken on trust from the OCR. Every repair is counted and listed. Translators' and editors' commentary is not printed, and the notes say where to find it; the authors' own notes are.

The selection, arrangement, four-part structure, editorial lines and twelve drawings are original to this edition.

If you find something that wants fixing, I would like to know.

Selected by Vishal T · @whatiamreadingtoday7