A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II

A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II is a glittering cabinet of intellectual demolition. Augustus De Morgan, the great 19th-century logician, turns his piercing wit upon the pretenders, pseudo-scientists, and philosophically-challenged who cluttered his era's intellectual landscape. With the deadly precision of a mathematician and the sardonic pleasure of a man who has seen every bad argument twice, he dismantles faulty reasoning wherever he finds it, from wobbly astronomical theories to the philosophical atheists who treat God as one hypothesis among many. His targets include the great Laplace, whose celestial mechanics he gently mocks, and the endless parade of 'paradoxers' who believed they had overturned mathematics without understanding it. But this is no dry academic treatise. De Morgan writes with a comic's timing and an essayist's grace, transforming what could be mere scholarly refutation into genuinely entertaining reading. He shows us that bad arguments have always been with us, and that the pleasure of seeing them properly dismantled is among the purestintellectual joys.