Shadows appear to be counterexamples to the causal theory of perception. After all, an absence of light cannot reflect light into our eyes. Roy Sorensen sets out to resolve this anomaly and to show how the causal theory solves a broad range of visual puzzles about dark things.

"Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, an account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before He made the world, he was told, "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning...