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ISBN: 9780593316313

Content: " The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice &bull,nbsp, poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe&mdash,he nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind&mdash,nd each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world &ldquo,A] mind-expanding book. . Elegantly written.&rdquo,&mdash,i〉The New York TimesArgentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth&mdash,hat love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn&rsquo, exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm&rsquo, absurdity when he had his own epiphany&mdash,hat there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system&mdash,hat the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality &ldquo,ut there&rdquo,and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life,the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason,and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.  ,br〉As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us&mdash,ot as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity."

Content: Biographisches: " WILLIAM EGGINTON is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher&rsquo, Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which explores the respective conceptions of reality in the thought of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His next book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, will be published in 2024." Rezension(2): "〈a href=http://lj.libraryjournal.com/ target=blank〉〈img src=https://images.contentreserve.com/libraryjournal_logo.png alt=Library Journal border=0 /〉〈/a〉: March 1, 2023 In The Rigor of Angels , John Hopkins professor Egginton explores how Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, German physicist Werner Heisenberg, and Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed against the limits of human understanding to give us a deepened view of the world. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2023 Library JournalCopyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission. " Rezension(3): "〈a href=http://www.kirkusreviews.com target=blank〉〈img src=https://images.contentreserve.com/kirkus_logo.png alt=Kirkus border=0 /〉〈/a〉: May 1, 2023 An intellectual history centered on three men who expanded our understanding of what we can and cannot know about reality. Egginton, a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins and author of The Splintering of the American Mind, describes in detail how Immanuel Kant in the 18th century and Werner Heisenberg and Jorge Luis Borges in the early 20th century grappled with the widely accepted metaphysical prejudice that reality is out there, encased in rigid space-time coordinates and conform[ing] to the image we construct of it. For Kant, these basic but false truths interfered with the necessary postulate of reason that enables us to manage our personal lives and public affairs. Human thought, he argued, brings reality into existence, and our perceptions are merely construct[s] in our minds. For Heisenberg, reality becomes real when science translates [it] into thought. Our ability to know reality is thus saturated with the ineradicable uncertainty intrinsic to both observation and language. Additionally, Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, together with Einstein's Theory of Relativity, undermined the presumed fixity of space and time. Borges was poetic in his assessments, noting that We...have dreamt the world, and the self's experience of permanence and solidity [is] illusory. Humans must straddle the impossible border between ephemerality and eternity, loss and permanence, never fully understanding themselves but still having to negotiate between freedom and responsibility. All three men elevated free will over determinism and dispensed with the autonomous and omniscient self. Divine origins were also cast aside: Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God's plan. Egginton traces Kant's influence on Heisenberg and Borges and situates the men in their historical contexts, discussing their personal lives, describing their seminal writings, and noting how their ideas emerged from engaging with others. A challenging book that rewards those willing to suspend their prejudice about the fixed nature of reality. COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. " Rezension(4): "〈a href=https://www.booklistonline.com target=blank〉〈img src=https://images.contentreserve.com/booklist_logo.png alt=Booklist border=0 /〉〈/a〉: September 1, 2023 Throughout history, humans have sought to understand, explain, and depict reality. This drive seems encoded in our DNA. The challenge, however, is that our primary instruments for observation, ourselves, are extremely limited and subjective. Egginton, a humanities scholar, presents this overview with panache and a keen sense of story, making the more complex scientific theories accessible and entertaining. Egginton carefully lays out the distinction between reality and our knowledge of it. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant acknowledged after reading Hume that he had awoken from my dogmatic slumbers. This theme recurs in the work of Werner Heisenberg, who had to reject previously accepted wisdom to devise his uncertainty principle. Indeed, the link between imagination and scientific insight is illuminated in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose fiction permitted his rational mind to become subservient to imaginative aspects. Egginton further draws on the work of a range of thinkers that includes Boethius, Dante, and Einstein while illuminating the subjects of free will, memory, the nature of time, and the multiverse in this accessible, thought-provoking work. COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. "

Language: English

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