Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander (2013), Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, New York: Basic Books (hardback, ISBN 978-0-465-01847-5; e-book ISBN 978-0-465-02158-1; Library of Congress 2013932688, call number BD190 .H64 2013; xiv, 578 pp., illustrated, references pp. 535–555, index). The publisher gives the hardback’s on-sale date as 23 April 2013 and 592 pages. The Library of Congress record has “[2013]” and “©2013”. Open Library dates it 2012, which neither the publisher nor the Library of Congress supports.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record, not a reading. What follows is what the book and its cataloguers say about it.
- The publisher’s description, verbatim in part: “Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. … We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on.” And: “Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.” Its examples include a two-year-old’s “I undressed the banana!” and the question of what Einstein saw that made him suspect light consists of particles.
- The catalogue’s summary: the book “Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.”
- The Library of Congress subject headings: analogy; reasoning.
- Contents, from the Library of Congress contents note: Analogy as the core of cognition; The evocation of words; The evocation of phrases; A vast ocean of invisible analogies; Abstraction and inter-category sliding; How analogies manipulate us; How we manipulate analogies; Naïve analogies; Analogies that shook the world; Katy and Anna debate the core of cognition. The note gives no chapter numbers or pages, and does not say which entries are a prologue or an epilogue.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request for the Fluid Analogies Research Group’s programme that analogy-making is the core of cognition. This is the programme’s thesis stated for human thought at large, with a developmental and educational psychologist as co-author, where Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, in this batch, stated it through computer models. No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it (checked by grep).
Deferred because it was not read. This record files a book from its
publisher’s description and contents when no lawful text can be read, and
does not rebuild a book from what others say about it.
The first contents entry has the title of Hofstadter’s 2001 essay “Analogy
as the core of cognition”, which is being filed at the same time by another
reader. Whether the book’s opening reprints, revises or only re-titles that
essay is for a reading of both. The publisher sets the book “alongside
Gödel, Escher, Bach” by quoting a review, which is not the book saying it
builds on anything, so no extends: is declared to any work in this batch.
Tags, as my inferences from the description and the contents titles. Beyond the works of this batch and the parallel filing, I found nothing already in the record that it connects to: the record holds no other work on analogy.
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philosophy-of-language: the entries on the evocation of words and phrases, and “Abstraction and inter-category sliding”, treat word choice and category extension as analogy. That is conceptual change, which the topic’s blurb names. -
philosophy-of-science: “Analogies that shook the world” and the description’s Einstein example put analogy at the source of scientific discovery. Whether the chapter argues a view of discovery, or tells its history, is for a reading to check, and the tag should be dropped if it is only history. Access when seeded: -
Library of Congress catalogue record (lccn.loc.gov/2013932688, through the loc.gov JSON API): publisher, date, extent, references pages, call number, subjects, the contents note and the summary. The MARCXML and MODS links on lccn.loc.gov returned HTTP 404.
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The public MARC record of the Internet Archive’s catalogue copy (surfacesessences0000hofs; cataloguing source UKM, modified by DLC): the hardback and e-book ISBNs and the same contents note.
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Hachette Book Group’s page for the hardback (ISBN 9780465018475): the description, the on-sale date and the page count.
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The Internet Archive scan is lending-only (access-restricted), so I did not open it. HathiTrust returned no record for the LCCN.
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Full texts circulating on a document-sharing site, on personal and file-hosting servers, and in an Internet Archive upload of “collected works” are not the publisher’s or the authors’. Summary PDFs from a book-summary service are reconstructions. I opened none of them.
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Crossref has no DOI for the book; it has one for a review in Science (2013).
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WorldCat returned HTTP 429. Google Books’ API refused for an exhausted daily quota.
On 2026-10-09 the manuscript bibliography of that day (work
what-survives-translation) named this book among the works it considered
and dropped. It was already held here, so it was not filed again; a fresh
access check found no lawful full text, and it stays Unavailable.