William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including 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), In Defense of Religious Moderation (Columbia UP, 2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016), Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2017) with David Castillo, The Splintering of the American Mind (Bloomsbury, 2018) and, again with David Castillo, What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth With Spanish Baroque Literature (McGill-Queens UP, 2022). Egginton’s current book project, The Rigor of Angels, which explores the respective conceptions of reality in the thought of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, will be published by Pantheon in June of 2023. His book for Bloomsbury’s Philosophical Filmmakers series on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of cinematic expression in the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky is also due out in 2023.
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Humanities in the Village (Aug.): “The Rigor of Angels” with Bill Egginton (and Sean Carroll)
August 28, 2023 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
It’s another year and another season of Humanities in the Village!
Kick off the new series with a discussion between AGHI’s own director, Bill Egginton, in conversation with Sean Carroll on “Ultimate Nature of Reality.” Celebrating his new book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Pantheon, Aug. 2023), Prof. Egginton will share with us this new “account of how a poet, a physicist, and a philosopher pursued truth to the very limits of human apprehension and revealed the fundamental nature of our place in the universe.”
Join us on the patio at the Ivy Bookshop in Mt. Washington for what promises a terrific discussion. More registration info to come.
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SPEAKER BIOS
Bill Egginton
Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He interested in how the world works at the deepest levels, which leads him to do research in physics and philosophy. His current interests include foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, statistical mechanics, complexity, and cosmology, with occasional dabblings elsewhere. His new book is The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, where he introduces modern physics with all the details, in a way accessible to anyone. He hosts a podcast, Mindscape, where he interviews smart people about all sorts of interesting ideas. [SC Website]