Description
Serres draws on a vast knowledge of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics, and a range of cultural material that includes the writings of Plato, Kant, August Comte, Balzac, and Shakespeare, to name a few. He argues that although philosophy has been instrumental in the past in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to recognize that such pockets of unity are islands of order in a sea of multiplicity--a sea which cannot really be conceived, but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and heard raging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization.
Philosophy of science or prose poetry, a classical meditation on metaphysics or a stream-of-consciousness polemic and veiled invective, Serres mounts a quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all a "noisy" critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, and aesthetics. The result is a work that is at once provocative, poetic, deeply personal, and ultimately religious--an apocalyptic call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.
About the Author
Michel Serres is one of the rare contemporary philosophers to propose an open vision of the world founded on an alliance between the humanities and science.
Reviews
An intensely beautiful and rigourous meditation on the birth of forms amid chaos and multiplicity from a major philosopher who is also an exquisite craftsman of the written word." -William Paulson, University of Michigan
"Serres exhibits a rare, raw tendentiousness refreshing in its vitriol . . . it's the sort of light-hearted, perverse, and basically liberal tirade one hears too infrequently of late." -Word
Book Information
ISBN 9780472084357
Author Michel Serres
Format Paperback
Page Count 152
Imprint The University of Michigan Press
Publisher The University of Michigan Press
Weight(grams) 228g