Overview

'Remarkable... Exciting, provocative, and illuminating' John Banville, Wall Street Journal Argentine writer 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 about the absurdity of the quantum realm 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 as far as they could go, concluding that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements and our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around one powerful, haunting truth: there is an irreconcilable difference between reality ""out there"" and reality as we experience it. In this soaring, lucid narrative, William Egginton profoundly demonstrates the enduring mystery of the world, and our place within it.

Full Product Details

9781805337676

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Leaves you smiling. Over and over again the author reminds you of the shimmering weirdness beneath the experiential surface of what we are pleased to call the real world... A marvellous eye-widening read' - Spectator 'Mind-expanding... Elegantly written... explores nothing less than 'the ulti-mate nature of reality'... This is a book about the tiniest of things - the position of an electron, an instant of change. It is also about the biggest of things - the cosmos, infinity, the possibility of free will' - New York Times 'Fascinating' - Carlo Rovelli

Author Information

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) and The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available