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Search resuls for: "William Egginton"


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As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton.
Persons: Nikhil Krishnan’s “, , Krishnan, William Egginton, Egginton, Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant Organizations: Oxford, Johns Hopkins University Locations: Oxford, Argentine
THE RIGOR OF ANGELS: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by William EggintonChances are, if you have ever heard the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, you haven’t forgotten it. Shereshevsky’s powers of memory were so remarkable that in 1929 he gave up his job as a journalist in Moscow and joined the circus. He could recite lists of numbers, poems in foreign languages, even strings of random syllables that were called out to him from the audience. Forgetting something wasn’t a matter of passively letting it slip away into oblivion; he had to actively destroy it in his mind. As William Egginton writes in “The Rigor of Angels,” a “perfect memory” can begin to resemble “total forgetting.”
Persons: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, William Egginton, Solomon Shereshevsky, Locations: Moscow
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