Waves and Stones: On the Ultimate Nature of Reality - Couverture rigide

Harman, Graham

 
9780241392867: Waves and Stones: On the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Synopsis

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers

How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?

In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.

To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.

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À propos de l?auteur

Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles. A key figure in the contemporary speculative realism movement in philosophy and known for his development of object-oriented ontology, he was named by Art Review magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures in international art. His previous books include Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin, 2018).

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780141990514: Waves and Stones: On the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  0141990511 ISBN 13 :  9780141990514
Editeur : Penguin, 2026
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