Bøker av William Egginton

A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explore the greatest enigmas of the universe in this scintillatingly original book about the limits of human knowledgeArgentine 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 as far as they could go, concluding 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. In this soaring, lucid reflection on the lives of Borges, Heisenberg and Kant, William Egginton profoundly demonstrates the enduring mystery of the world, and our place within it.

In this book, William Egginton argues for the centrality of a psychoanalytic notion of interpretation for philosophy and literary theory.

Perversity and Ethics argues that a psychoanalytic reading of the phenomenon of perversity is crucial to understanding contemporary philosophical ethics.

The Theater of Truth is a book for those interested and engaged in the debates around baroque and neobaroque aesthetics, and offers a unified theory for the relation between these terms and a new vocabulary for distinguishing between their ideological values.

In his latest book, 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 Christians, Jews, and Muslims, 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 "e;code of codes."e; In his view, being a religious fundamentalist does not require adhering to a particular religious creed. 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. Surprisingly, perhaps the most effective weapon against such thinking is religious moderation, a way of believing that questions the very possibility of a code of codes as the source of all human knowledge. 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.