Humanities In The Village: William Egginton (With Sean Carroll)
The Ivy Bookshop and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University present the latest installment of Humanities in the Village, featuring Dr. William Egginton and his book The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality! Dr. Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, will join Dr. Egginton in conversation.
A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.
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 (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth With Spanish Baroque Literature (2022).
SEAN CARROLL is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy – in effect, a joint appointment between physics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He is also Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Most of Sean’s career has been spent doing research on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation, looking at topics such as dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions and violations of fundamental symmetries. These days his focus has shifted to more foundational questions, both in quantum mechanics (origin of probability, emergence of space and time) and statistical mechanics (entropy and the arrow of time, emergence and causation, dynamics of complexity), bringing a more philosophical dimension to his work. Sean lives in Baltimore with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette, and two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
