Decker Professor in the Humanities, JHU, author of The Rigor of Angels (Pantheon, 2023)
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Articles by William Egginton
Book Review: The Arrogant Ape, by Christine Webb
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Think You’re at the Top of the Food Chain? Think Again. In “The Arrogant Ape,” the primatologist Christine Webb takes a hard look at our human superiority complex, and is not impressed. As Christine Wells argues, the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence rests on data that for centuries has been systematically rigged in our favor.
Think You’re at the Top of the Food Chain? Think Again.
50 Ridiculously Funny Photos That Will Make You Feel Better About Summer Ending Laugh good. Cry bad. So laugh. I just got back from a dream vacation to Greece and Rome — that's me and my family in front of the Colosseum! How cool is that? Anyhoo, now that I'm back hard at work — you know, clicking around the internet looking for funny photos — I discovered a whooooole bunch of …
Table of Contents - March 21, 2024
The Trouble with Reality William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of our human point of view.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton
New York. Pantheon. 2023. 368 pages. At first glance, the thinkers spotlighted in William Egginton’s book don’t necessarily belong together. Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges, and Werner Heisenberg worked in different fields, and the latter two made their breakthroughs more than a century after Kant’s death. But for Egginton, a prolific author of books on ethics, literary theory, and identity politics, such differences are secondary to the unlikely trio’s shared sense of purpose.
The Iliad
When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017―rendering the ancient poem in contemporary language that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)―critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time.
Quantum poetics - William Egginton
As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.
10 books like Why Does the World Exist?
Rovelli is one of the leading physicists in the world… and he writes like a novelist. In Helgoland Rovelli tells the riveting story of the invention of quantum mechanics, while also explaining quantum mechanics—no mean feat! His book is at once a primer on the most important discovery of modern physics and a philosophical reflection on what that discovery tells us about ourselves, our knowledge, and the nature of the universe itself.
The best books about the ultimate nature of reality
By William Egginton Who am I? I am a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins and have spent my career thinking, teaching, and writing about the relations between literature, philosophy, and science. Many years ago I started out thinking I would be a scientist, but then got pulled into literature and philosophy. Still, that original passion never left me.
On the “Inverted Cosmos”-From Aristotle to the Middle Ages
Long before he gained fame as one of the world’s most beloved writers of children’s fiction, C. S. Lewis earned his reputation as a scholar of medieval literature. He taught this subject first at Oxford University before moving to Cambridge in 1954 to assume the newly created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a position he would hold for the rest of his career. One of the subjects Lewis lectured on at both storied schools was how people in the Middle Ages imagined the cosmos.
What Kant Can Teach Us About the Limits of AI
The philosophical world is busy making plans to mark the 300th birthday next year of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Non-philosophers might be forgiven for wondering why they should care about the opinions of a man who lived before the onset of cars, computers, and climate change. But arguably the most important thinker of European modernity had insights that can still illuminate some of our most vexing problems.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Praise for The Rigor of Angels "[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written. . . . This is a book about the tiniest of things--the position of an electron, an instant of change. It is also about the biggest of things--the cosmos, infinity, the possibility of free will. Egginton works through ideas by grounding them in his characters' lives. . . .
Academic Tenure Is Broken. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Case Makes That Clear.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a renowned journalist, recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Barely a month ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced to much fanfare that she had been appointed to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Bubble-Wrapped Americans: How the U.S. Became Obsessed with Physical and Emotional Safety
“In America we say if anyone gets hurt, we will ban it for everyone everywhere for all time. And before we know it, everything is banned.” (Ammo.com) It’s a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world.
Bubble-Wrapped Americans: How The US Became Obsessed With Physical & Emotional Safety
Via Ammo.com, “In America we say if anyone gets hurt, we will ban it for everyone everywhere for all time. And before we know it, everything is banned.” - Professor Jonathan Haidt It’s a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world.
Hermeneutics and the Framing of “Truth”
MAY 5, 2020 IN HIS 2018 BOOK Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre sums up what has become a mainstream warning about the complicity of so-called postmodern intellectuals in the rise of “post-truth” as the defining condition of today’s politics. He asks: “[C]an postmodernism be used by anyone who wants to attack science?
The Symphonic Subject: Beethoven, Hegel, Adorno
On a chilly October day in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte's army laid waste to Prussian troops on the outskirts of Jena, a university town in central Germany. The sounds of his canons reverberated through the town, providing a sound track for the young philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as he put the finishing touches on a work that would change the course of history.
Truth Through Motion
Image by Michelle Jia by William Egginton On a chilly October day in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army laid waste to Prussian troops on the outskirts of Jena, a university town in central Germany. The sounds of his canons reverberated through the town, providing a sound track for the young philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as he put the finishing touches on a work that would change the course of history.
A Review of: Martin Hägglund's This Life and Yi-Ping Ong's The Art of Being
Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom Format: 450 pp., hardcover; Size: 6.5” x 9.6”; Price: $25.95; Publisher: Pantheon; Number of Norwegian best-selling authors discussed in this book: One Number of years the author spent as assistant professor before being hired with tenure: Zero Most difficult German philosopher elegantly clarified: Heidegger or Hegel, it’s a toss-up Representative Passage: “Part of what compels us to keep faith with what we love is our...
Whose Life? | Public Books
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the more so because of the book’s heft. It is a work of philosophy that engages long-standing debates on time, selfhood, and freedom.
Ben Lerner's Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge such intimate and intoxicating but reckless honesty? The Norwegian journalist Tonje Aursland, for example, was formerly married to literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard. She read about her then husband’s ongoing affair, which would ultimately end their marriage, along with the rest of Norway in her husband’s novel.
Virtual Roundtable on “The Ego and the Id”
Sigmund Freud died 80 years ago this week, and his 1923 study, The Ego and the Id, which introduced many of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis, entered the public domain earlier this year. Freud’s ideas have long been absorbed by popular culture, but what role do they continue to play in the academy, in the clinical profession, and in everyday life?
Opinion | Is Computer Code a Foreign Language?
No. And high schools shouldn’t treat it that way. By William Egginton Dr. Egginton is a professor of the humanities. March 17, 2019 Maryland’s legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school.
Diversity and the Weaponization of Identity Politics
Despite its success in the midterm elections, the Democratic Party continues to be divided, with one faction seeming to focus on the economic plight of working families and the other staking new claims for women and people of color. Along with important structural disadvantages, this story is part of what is allowing an unrepresentative Republican Party maintain control of most of the branches of government.
The Left-Wing Case Against Tenure
Outside of higher education, tenure is a four-letter word. Academe is the only profession in which employees can hope for such thorough protection from termination. As such, tenure is a source of irritation for politicians like State Rep. Rick...
El monstruo de Frankenstein, hoy; por William Egginton
En este Halloween, esperé ver más disfraces del monstruo de Frankenstein. Al fin y al cabo, este 2018 se cumplen 200 años de haberse publicado la novela de Mary Shelley. Era poco probable que vea una representación precisa de la creación de Victor Frankenstein. La descripción del ser hecha por Shelley –a quien Frankenstein a menudo llama demonio– es decididamente vaga. Él es enorme; tiene el pelo largo y negro; es espantoso y mira a su creador con un “ojo opaco y amarillo”.
Opinion | What Frankenstein’s Monster Really Looks Like
This Halloween I’m hoping to see at least a few trick-or-treaters dressed as Frankenstein’s monster. After all, this year is the 200th since the publication of Mary Shelley’s great novel, which perhaps more than any other book has become the model of modern literary horror.
The Splintering of the Student Mind
In 2017, when some teenagers in a town in Virginia were convicted of defacing a historic African-American schoolhouse with racist and anti-Semitic slurs, Judge Avelina Jacob sentenced them to a year of reading and writing reports on literary and...
Opinion | What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Really Shows
The problem is not the subject matter. It’s that these scholars are marginalized in overly specialized fields. By William Egginton Dr. Egginton is the author of “The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses.” Oct. 6, 2018 Image Harvard University campus. Another culture war, another hoax inflicted on left-wing academics.
The Left-Wing Case Against Tenure
Outside of higher education, tenure is a four-letter word. Academe is the only profession in which employees can hope for such thorough protection from termination. As such, tenure is a source of irritation for politicians like State Rep. Rick Brattin, a Missouri Republican, who in January 2017 introduced a bill to eliminate the practice at Missouri State and nullify the protected status of already-tenured professors.
The Splintering of the Student Mind
In 2017, when some teenagers in a town in Virginia were convicted of defacing a historic African-American schoolhouse with racist and anti-Semitic slurs, Judge Avelina Jacob sentenced them to a year of reading and writing reports on literary and philosophical classics, such as Richard Wright and Hannah Arendt.
Campus Culture Wars and the Future of American Community
Thirty years ago this summer two students filed suit in federal court against Dartmouth College charging the administration with racial discrimination. The students were both white, and had been disciplined by the school for harassing a black professor. At the time I was in my second year at Dartmouth, a school that was simultaneously in the backwaters of New England and on the frontlines of the culture wars.
The Splintering of the American Mind
“Timely . . .
Richard Rorty’s Legacy: Criticizing His Critics
SINCE HIS DEATH 10 years ago Richard Rorty’s work seems to have been somewhat marginalized, and now, in spite of his very public and successful career, his name and his contributions go almost unmentioned. After the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979, Rorty became one of the main philosophers to capture the attention of a large group of thinkers in all of the philosophical fields and the social and political sciences.
‘Don Quixote’ and today’s media revolution
The Spanish novel aptly captures the ramifications of two media ages in which everyone has access to multiple, often conflicting...
Letter From Austria: Is Europe‘s ‘Tolerant Society’ Backfiring?
VIENNA — Not long ago, riding the subway with my 8-year-old son to his school here, I noticed a headline in a newspaper left on a nearby seat: “Schoolteacher sues Muslim father for refusing to shake hands with her.” Compared with the alarming rise of the far-right Freedom Party here in Austria in recent months, this was minor news, but resonant. It seemed to point in some way to the clash-of-civilizations narrative feeding the xenophobic brand of politics ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Man Who Invented Fiction
William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a professor of German and Romance languages and literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Man Who Invented Fiction , and joins Signature today to discuss Cervantes’ influence on the history of literature. In January of 1605, Cervantes published Don Quixote, and its rapid success brought him fame throughout Spain.
The Man Who Invented Fiction
About The Man Who Invented Fiction In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures.
Art of political fiction
This year we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of a man who, more than any other, trained the modern world in the art of fiction. In 2016 we also seem destined to pass another milestone: the low-tide mark for truth in politics. While the two points may seem unrelated, it turns out that Miguel de Cervantes has a lot to tell us about why politicians lie so unrepentantly, and why their lies are so resistant to being debunked by mere facts.
What the art of fiction teaches us about political lies
This year we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of a man who, more than any other, trained the modern world in the art of fiction. In 2016 we also seem destined to pass another milestone: the low-tide mark for truth in politics.
Dreamboat Vampires and Zombie Capitalists
Photo Alexander Skarsgard, who played the vampire Eric Northman in "True Blood," left, and a zombie from "The Walking Dead." If popularity on television and movie screens is any indication, a good number of the costumed ghouls knocking on our doors this October 31 will be the modern West’s two preferred trespassers from the afterlife — vampires and zombies. At first blush, these nightmarish cousins couldn’t be further apart.
On Borges, Particles and the Paradox of the Perceived
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. In 1927 a young German physicist published a paper that would turn the scientific world on its head. Until that time, classical physics had assumed that when a particle’s position and velocity were known, its future trajectory could be calculated.
Hoaxes of Dreams
From Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. Illustration by Gustave Doré, 1863. by William Egginton Popularly known as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes won that title ostensibly by rejecting traditional modes of intellectual inquiry largely associated with commentary on prior texts, and replacing them with the first attempt at a kind of radical phenomenology.
Can Neuroscience Challenge Roe V. Wade?
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. When I was asked this summer to serve as an expert witness in an appellate case that some think could lead to the next Supreme Court test of Roe v. Wade, I was surprised.
Can Neuroscience Challenge Roe V. Wade?
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. When I was asked this summer to serve as an expert witness in an appellate case that some think could lead to the next Supreme Court test of Roe v. Wade, I was surprised.
'Quixote,' Colbert and the Reality of Fiction
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. In his contribution to The Stone last week, Alex Rosenberg posed a defense of naturalism — “the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge” — at the expense of other theoretical endeavors such as, notably, literary theory.
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