254 | William Egginton on Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2023

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It can be tempting, when first introduced to a deep concept of physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to draw grand philosophical conclusions about the impossibility of knowing anything precisely. That is generally a temptation to be resisted, just because it's so easy to do it wrong. But there is absolutely a place for a careful humanistic synthesis of these kinds of scientific ideas with other ideas, for example from philosophy or literature. That's the kind of task William Egginton takes on in his new book The Rigor of Angels, which compares the work of philosopher Immanuel Kant, physicist Werner Heisenberg, and author Jorge Luis Borges, three thinkers who grappled with limitations on our aspirations to know reality directly.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/23/254-william-egginton-on-kant-heisenberg-and-borges/

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William Egginton received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. He is currently the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins. He is the author of numerous books on literature, literary theory, and philosophy. In addition to The Rigor of Angels, he has an upcoming book on the work of Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What happens now? How will I cope? How will I cope? Sometimes you don't want to talk about
0:08.0	cancer, the people you know. You just want to talk to someone who knows how you feel.
0:14.4	That's why I joined the Macmillan online community.
0:18.0	We know what it's like because we're living with cancer too.
0:22.0	And whatever's on your mind, we're living with cancer too.
0:26.0	And whatever's on your mind, we're here to help. To join us, search Macmillan online community.
0:30.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Here at
0:34.8	Mindscape you may have noticed we occasionally talk about quantum mechanics. That's a
0:39.6	favorite theme of ours here and so one name that will appear sometimes when talking
0:43.8	about quantum mechanics is that of Verner Heisenberg, the early 20th century
0:47.8	physicist who actually was one of the authors of the first fully formed theory of quantum mechanics called matrix
0:54.6	mechanics. We also talk about philosophy and if you're into talking about
0:58.6	philosophy one name that will come up is Emmanuel Kant, the German philosopher from the 18th century who
1:04.7	wrote about just everything in philosophy, political philosophy, ethical philosophy,
1:09.0	aesthetics, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, all those things.
1:14.0	And we did in fact, I had to check this, I'll admit, but we have in fact mentioned Jorge
1:18.6	Luis Borjes, the poet, Spanish language poet from South America,
1:22.8	from Argentina in particular, poet and short story writer.
1:26.6	He was mentioned in the episode that we did long ago
1:29.5	with Alan Lightman.
1:30.8	Alan Lightman mentioned that he was a fan of the magical realists like Italo Calvino,
1:36.4	Borjace and others. Borjace is a wonderful poetic imaginative writer who I can heartily
	...

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