Infinity & Perspective (The MIT Press) - Softcover

Harries, Karsten

Softcover

ISBN 10: 026258218X ISBN 13: 9780262582186

Publisher: MIT Press, 2002

Synopsis

A philosophical exploration of the origin and limits of the modern world.

Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can be understood as a symptom of our civilization's discontent, born of regret that we are no longer able to experience our world as a cosmos that assigns us our place. But dissatisfaction with the modern world may also spring from a conviction that modernism has failed to confront the challenge of an inevitably open future. Such conviction has frequently led to a critique of modernity's founding heroes. Challenging that critique, Harries insists that modernity is supported by nothing other than human freedom. But more important to Harries is to show how modernist self-assertion is shadowed by nihilism and what it might mean to step out of that shadow. Looking at a small number of medieval and Renaissance texts, as well as some paintings, he uncovers the threshold that separates the modern from the premodern world. At the same time, he illuminates that other, more questionable threshold, between the modern and the postmodern.

Two spirits preside over the book: Alberti, the Renaissance author on art and architecture, whose passionate interest in perspective and point of view offers a key to modernity; and Nicolaus Cusanus, the fifteenth-century cardinal, whose work shows that such interest cannot be divorced from speculations on the infinity of God. The title Infinity and Perspective connects the two to each other and to the shape of modernity.

About this title

About the Author

Karsten Harries is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026258218X
• ISBN 13: 9780262582186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392