Download or read book The Rigor of Angels written by William Egginton and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world “[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written.” —The New York Times Argentine 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—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that 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—that 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 “out there” 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. 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—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.
Download or read book Summary of William Egginton s The Rigor of Angels written by Milkyway Media and published by Milkyway Media. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get the Summary of William Egginton's The Rigor of Angels in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Solomon Shereshevsky, a journalist with an extraordinary memory, was studied by psychiatrist Alexander Luria, leading to a career as a mnemonist. Shereshevsky's synesthesia and memory affected his understanding of abstract concepts and sense of self. Meanwhile, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, facing a personal crisis, questioned the self and language's ability to connect people. His works explored memory and identity, paralleling Shereshevsky's experiences...
Download or read book The Rigor of Angels written by William Egginton and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world “[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written.” —The New York Times “A remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced.” —John Banville, The Wall Street Journal Argentine 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—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that 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—that 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 “out there” 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. 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—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.
Download or read book Angels and Ages written by Adam Gopnik and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world. Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them as thinkers and writers, making and witnessing the great changes in thought that mark truly modern times.
Download or read book In Defense of Religious Moderation written by William Egginton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Egginton laments the current debate over religion in America, in which religious fundamentalists have set the tone of political discourse--no one can get elected without advertising a personal relation to God, for example--and prominent atheists treat religious belief as the root of all evil. Neither of these positions, Egginton argues, adequately represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans who, while identifying as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, do not find fault with those who support different faiths and philosophies. In fact, Egginton goes so far as to question whether fundamentalists and atheists truly oppose each other, united as they are in their commitment to a "code of codes." Fundamentalists--and stringent atheists--unconsciously believe that the methods we use to understand the world are all versions of an underlying master code. This code of codes represents an ultimate truth, explaining everything. The moderately religious, with their inherent skepticism toward a master code, are best suited to protect science, politics, and other diverse strains of knowledge from fundamentalist attack and to promote a worldview based on the compatibility between religious faith and scientific method.
Download or read book What Would Cervantes Do written by David Castillo and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts –movies, television shows, and infotainment – alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy.
Download or read book On the Side of the Angels written by Nancy L. Rosenblum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science, their governing and electoral functions among the chief concerns of the field. Yet they are often presented as grubby arenas of ambition, or worse. This book is a vigorous defence of their virtues.
Download or read book The Splintering of the American Mind written by William Egginton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely, provocative, necessary look at how identity politics has come to dominate college campuses and higher education in America at the expense of a more essential commitment to equality. Thirty years after the culture wars, identity politics is now the norm on college campuses-and it hasn't been an unalloyed good for our education system or the country. Though the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay pride led to profoundly positive social changes, William Egginton argues that our culture's increasingly narrow focus on individual rights puts us in a dangerous place. The goal of our education system, and particularly the liberal arts, was originally to strengthen community; but the exclusive focus on individualism has led to a new kind of intolerance, degrades our civic discourse, and fatally distracts progressive politics from its commitment to equality. Egginton argues that our colleges and universities have become exclusive, expensive clubs for the cultural and economic elite instead of a national, publicly funded project for the betterment of the country. Only a return to the goals of community, and the egalitarian values underlying a liberal arts education, can head off the further fracturing of the body politic and the splintering of the American mind. With lively, on-the-ground reporting and trenchant analysis, The Splintering of the American Mind is a powerful book that is guaranteed to be controversial within academia and beyond. At this critical juncture, the book challenges higher education and every American to reengage with our history and its contexts, and to imagine our nation in new and more inclusive ways.
Download or read book Borges and Me written by Jay Parini and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kindof novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery tour of an era, like our own, in which uncertainties abound, and when—as ever—it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.
Download or read book Machine written by Susan Steinberg and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting story of guilt and blame in the wake of a drowning, the first novel by the author of Spectacle Susan Steinberg’s first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers—both locals and wealthy out-of-towners—during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless. A daring stylist, Steinberg contrasts semicolon-studded sentences with short lines that race down the page. This restless approach gains focus and power through a sharply drawn narrative that ferociously interrogates gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. Machine is the kind of novel—relentless and bold—that only Susan Steinberg could have written.
Download or read book Angels and Demons written by Michael F. Patella and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The supernatural world is prominent in many of today's movies, television shows, novels, and the popular imagination. But some of what is presented as grounded in a Christian worldview is in fact far from that. In Angels and Demons, Michael Patella, OSB, offers an accessible and fascinating look at supernatural realities as they really are presented in the Bible and Christian tradition. Among the topics Patella explores with a valuable combination of pastoral wisdom and academic rigor are: the role of angels in the ministry of Jesus the apocalyptic battle in Revelation the occult, possession, and the work of Satan what angels are and what they're not the Last Judgment: how? when? Readers will appreciate Patella's level-headed appraisal of the views of the supernatural world in the various sections of the Bible. They will be engaged by his lucid account of "Who's Who in Hell." They will be both comforted and inspired by his foundational conviction that Christ has claimed creation for the forces of good, evil is on the run, and there is no chance of the tide ever turning the other way, evil actions and human suffering notwithstanding.
Download or read book The Angel The Abyss written by Gunther, J. Daniel and published by Nicolas-Hays, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this companion to Initiation in the Aeon of the Child, now available in paperback, author J. Daniel Gunther provides detailed and cohesive analysis of the two major spiritual crises in the career of the aspirant in the Aeon of the Child--the Knowledge & Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and the Crossing the Abyss between the divine realms and the human. Expounding on the sublime Formulas of Initiation confronting those who would aspire to these Mysteries, the author draws deeply from Jungian psychology, world mythology and religion, and the doctrines of the classic Mystery traditions, explaining how the revelations of Thelema apply to the individual. The Angel & The Abyss is written in clear, precise language that will aid those students who seek to navigate the difficult terrain of this advanced stage of the Spiritual quest. More knowledgeable students will find tantalizing clues to serve as guideposts and eventual confirmations of their direct experience. The book offers copious illustrations including some in full color and numerous diagrams. It features detailed references that encompass ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, Greek philosophy, alchemy, hermetic qabalah, and tarot, as well as the writings of Carl Jung, Eric Neumann and Aleister Crowley.
Download or read book Borges Between History and Eternity written by Hernan Diaz and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the intersection of aesthetics, politics and metaphysics in Borges's texts, and analyzes their interaction with the North American canon.
Download or read book Eternity written by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eternity is a unique kind of existence that is supposed to belong to the most real being or beings. It is an existence that is not shaken by the common wear and tear of time. Over the two and half millennia history of Western philosophy we find various conceptions of eternity, yet one sharp distinction between two notions of eternity seems to run throughout this long history: eternity as timeless existence, as opposed to eternity as existence in all times. Both kinds of existence stand in sharp contrast to the coming in and out of existence of ordinary beings, like hippos, humans, and toothbrushes: were these eternally-timeless, for example, a hippo could not eat, a human could not think or laugh, and a toothbrush would be of no use. Were a hippo an eternal-everlasting creature, it would not have to bother itself with nutrition in order to extend its existence. Everlasting human beings might appear similar to us, but their mental life and patterns of behavior would most likely be very different from ours. The distinction between eternity as timelessness and eternity as everlastingness goes back to ancient philosophy, to the works of Plato and Aristotle, and even to the fragments of Parmenides' philosophical poem. In the twentieth century, it seemed to go out of favor, though one could consider as eternalists those proponents of realism in philosophy of mathematics, and those of timeless propositions in philosophy of language (i.e., propositions that are said to exist independently of the uttered sentences that convey their thought-content). However, recent developments in contemporary physics and its philosophy have provided an impetus to revive notions of eternity due to the view that time and duration might have no place in the most fundamental ontology. The importance of eternity is not limited to strictly philosophical discussions. It is a notion that also has an important role in traditional Biblical interpretation. The Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God considered to be most sacred, is derived from the Hebrew verb for being, and as a result has been traditionally interpreted as denoting eternal existence (in either one of the two senses of eternity). Hence, Calvin translates the Tetragrammaton as 'l'Eternel', and Mendelssohn as 'das ewige Wesen' or 'der Ewige'. Eternity also plays a central role in contemporary South American fiction, especially in the works of J.L. Borges. The representation of eternity poses a major challenge to both literature and arts (just think about the difficulty of representing eternity in music, a thoroughly temporal art). The current volume aims at providing a history of the philosophy of eternity surrounded by a series of short essays, or reflections, on the role of eternity and its representation in literature, religion, language, liturgy, science, and music. Thus, our aim is to provide a history of philosophy as a discipline that is in constant commerce with various other domains of human inquisition and exploration.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges written by Edwin Williamson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was one of the great writers of the twentieth century and the most influential author in the Spanish language of modern times. He had a seminal influence on Latin American literature and a lasting impact on literary fiction in many other languages. However, Borges has been accessible in English only through a number of anthologies drawn mainly from his work of the 1940s and 1950s. The primary aim of this Companion is to provide a more comprehensive account of Borges's oeuvre and the evolution of his writing. It offers critical assessments by leading scholars of the poetry of his youth and the later poetry and fiction, as well as of the 'canonical' volumes of the middle years. Other chapters focus on key themes and interests, and on his influence in literary theory and translation studies.
Download or read book She Would Be King written by Wayétu Moore and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history—a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formation Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them. Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.
Download or read book The Man Who Invented Fiction written by William Egginton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In 1605 a crippled, greying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the most widely read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing.' In Cervantes' time, 'fiction' was synonymous with a lie. Books were either history, and true, or 'poetry' which might be invented, but had to conform to strict principles. Don Quixote tells the story of a poor nobleman, addled from reading too many books on chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off to put the world to rights. The book was hugely entertaining, broke the existing rules, devised a new set and, in the process, created a new, modern hybrid form we know today as the novel. The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his life and influences converged in his work, and how his work – especially Don Quixote – radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.
