My passion for ‘Escapes and Returns to an Uncertain Future’ started in the summer when I left my parents to go for a holiday to Spain, along with three boyfriends of my age, 18 years old. And this passion continued until I returned 3 months later, it even continued back at home. Because now I knew how good it is to escape, I knew that escapes would pop up again, and in unforeseen directions. And so will happy returns! The two moods are only the two sides of the same pulsation called life. In reading good books, in experiencing adventures, I rediscover the details of specific escapes and particular returns.
I love this book because it shows me the intensity with which the intellectual challenges that the revolution in theoretical physics after Einstein brought about were forcing Erwin Schrödinger to escape to Helgoland. Carlo Rovelli’s description of this unique historical episode, which changed the path of natural sciences, which gave birth to quantum theory, made me trust in the possibility of singular theoretical breakthroughs.
Rovelli has been called the poet in the current gallery of leading scientists in quantum theory. With this book, he showed me that he really is. When Schrödinger escapes from the stagnating attempts of formalisation of observed phenomena to go to Helgoland, when he then returns with a stupifying solution that overthrows the intellectual world into a delightful turmoil—that is poetry and knowledge packed in the same book.
Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian
“Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator… This is the place where science comes to life.” ―Neil Gaiman
“One of the warmest, most elegant and most lucid interpreters to the laity of the dazzling enigmas of his discipline...[a] momentous book” ―John Banville, The Wall Street Journal
A startling new look at quantum theory, from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Anaximander.
This book is a treasure chest for me, which I take from my bookshelf again and again. When I first bought it—many years ago—I read it in one breathtaking sweep. It is THE book that incorporates modernity, the ‘break’ being the signum of modernity (in Adorno’s own words).
Adorno left ‘high philosophical theory’, escaped from the intricate loops of Hegelianism, to land in a landscape of seemingly trivial paragraphs hiding deep thought. As a mysterious pillar saint of the youth revolt of 68 (which he despised), his insights in this book remain in my brain like little hooks.
They make me return to my bookshelf again and again. The modern world is broken like the paragraphs in this book. Based on that, we will return.
Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.
When I read Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus logico-philosophicus’ some 50 years ago, I was immediately fascinated. Throughout my academic career, this most mysterious—and at the same time clearest—philosophic mind of his generation has inspired me in many ways.
He had tried to nail down the clarity of mathematical argumentation in his early work, only to escape to the jungle of arguments following his concept of ‘sprachspiele’ in his second philosophical stage. And parallel to this mental journal, he physically escaped to a lonely hut in Norway to live in solitude.
Constantine Sandis, the author of this brand-new book, is the leading expert on Wittgenstein studies. He takes the reader on a journey that leads right up to the current debates on artificial intelligence. Wittgenstein returns!
The book brings together Constantine Sandis's essays on Wittgenstein's approach to understanding others. Sandis sketches a picture of how his anti-scepticism with regard to the philosophical problem of 'other minds' is not only compatible with but also supported by his scepticism concerning the real-life difficulty of understanding others (and being understood by them). While each individual essay focuses on particular issues in Wittgenstein (including philosophical anthropology, interpersonal psychology, and animal concepts), they collectively paint a picture of what he takes the real problem of other minds to be, how to overcome it, and the limitations of our understanding. Sandis not…
I chose this book as an easy leisure read for a holiday in Greece, and I fell in enduring love with it. Umberto Eco is not only the master of the theory of sign systems (semiotics) but also able to escape from the dry plains of scientific conclusions to the rich landscapes of historical narratives.
In this book, he shows us that Europe’s early development has not just been the linearly ascending advance from ancient Greece, via the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance. The narrator he invented for his book lets us return to the many threats from which the Middle Ages in Europe could emerge.
I started reading it as an entertaining storytelling book, but in the middle of this adventure, I realized how deeply into scientific thought Eco, the specialist in medieval studies, had abducted me.
An extraordinary epic, brilliantly-imagined, new novel from a world-class writer and author of The Name of the Rose. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention.
It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.
There were a few books that were able to carry me off into an entirely new cultural environment without reducing my interest in its multi-faceted characters and the seemingly trivial biographical stories. For me, Maxim Gorki, the artist, is a monolith in literature, and this book is a marvel.
The protagonist, young Gorki, has escaped the narrow and backward childhood in rural, almost medieval, Russia and tries to study at a university. It is his insatiable will to learn, to understand, which makes him so special. But every move towards university, towards more knowledge, turns out to be in vain. It leaves him a bit sad, but not hopeless.
He can always return to his reassuring doubt, a lonely doubt. Like the author in his later life—the book was published in 1924—the protagonist is lonely, ever lonelier. He escapes and returns from the pulsation of life itself, of its unknown future. Fascinating.
"My Universities" concludes Gorky's autobiographical trilogy whose first book is Childhood. Alexei Peshkov—the future writer Maxim Gorky—lost both his parents when he was little more than a child. He worked as a boy in a shoe shop, then as a dishwasher on a Volga steamboat, and then was apprenticed to some icon painters. He came to Kazan when he was 16 with the hope of being admitted to the University, but he was sorely disappointed. Instead of studying he had to do manual work for a living, and share the existence of the paupers in the slums. Such were the…
This book is about a mood and its real-life consequences. The story is scarily trivial: In Europe, the extreme right, neo-fascist parties succeeded in gaining state power. Three men try to escape from the continent. They use a train, a bus, and finally a ship. They are unknown, but at the end of the story, some knee-deep knowledge of these characters emerges. The mood is the will to escape born out of vaguely defined angst, turning into hope following an idea of Spinoza.
Spinoza’s message is simple: Mankind is nature. We have inhaled all the contradictions that are out there in pure matter. The good news is that we can escape, we can leave the evil networks, the racist local culture, the nationalist dead ends, and the dangerous megalomanic clowns that are trying to tie us up in.
