Table of Contents

Introduction: Playing with Pebbles
1 World War Crisis
2 The Greeks: A Protohistory of Theory
3 Plato, Aristotle, and the Future of Western Thought
4 Monotheism’s Math Problem
5 From Descartes to Kant: An Outrageously Succinct History of Philosophy
6 What Numbers Need: Or, When Does 2 + 2 = 4?
7 Physics (and Poetry): Willing Sameness and Difference
8 Axioms of Desire: Economics and the Social Sciences
9 Killing Time
10 Ethical Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Names

About the Author

David Nirenberg is dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in the Committee of Social Thought and the Department of History. His books include Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, Neighboring Faiths: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today; and Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. After doing research in mathematics for a dozen years, David's father, Ricardo L. Nirenberg turned to his other calling: philosophy and literature. He has published numerous essays, short fiction, and the novels Cry Uncle and Wave Mechanics: a Love Story. He is the founder and editor of the literary journal offcourse.org.

Reviews

"Ricardo and David Nirenberg, father and son scholars of mathematics and history, have teamed up in a breathtaking voyage examining the foundations and limits of knowledge in western thought. Not content with secondary sources, they have translated from the literature in their original languages: Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. In particular, they target mathematics and the natural sciences, and the way the concepts of sameness and differences affect our understanding of the natural world. But in the process, the authors touch upon many other facets of human endeavor, all named after their Greek roots: poetry, philosophy, psychology, economy. Along this wildly entertaining journey, we meet dozens of erudite thinkers, scientists, and writers such as Anaximander, Al-Farabi, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Reiner Maria Rilke. The book arrives just in time to give us ammunition as attempts are being made to put truth itself into the supercollider. It is a source of inspiration and comfort to learn how the far-flung ideas about numbers, our existence, and the world we live in have been debated in the past."--Joachim Frank, Columbia University, Nobel Prize in Chemistry