The Rigor of Angels

Resumen del libro

NEW IN PAPERBACK: A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explore the greatest enigmas of the universe in this scintillatingly original book about the limits of human knowledge

'Fascinating' Carlo Rovelli

'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.

Biografía del autor

William Egginton, crítico literario y filósofo, es profesor Decker de Humanidades, catedrático del Departamento de Lenguas y Literaturas Modernas y director del Instituto de Humanidades Alexander Grass de la Universidad Johns Hopkins. Es autor de múltiples libros en los que trata temas de filosofía, religión, literatura e historia, entre otros.