About this item
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. 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.
About the Author
William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. He is the author of How the World Became a Stage (2003) , Perversity and Ethics (2006) , A Wrinkle in History (2007) , The Philosopher's Desire (2007) , The Theater of Truth (2010) , and In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011) . He is also co-editor with Mike Sandbothe of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004) , translator of Lisa Block de Behar's Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003, 2nd edition 2014) , and co-editor with David E. Johnson of Thinking With Borges (2009) . His most recent book is The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World (2016) .
