Hello, friend!
I am the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, author, and frequent contributor to various publications. My research and teaching focus on literature, intellectual history, and the relation between literature and philosophy.
A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe--the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind--and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world
Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth--that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn't exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm's absurdity when he had his own epiphany--that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system--that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.
Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality "out there" and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.
As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. 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.
Latest Releases
What Would Cervantes Do?
Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature
The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses
Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media
Coming Soon
Alejandro Jodorowsky:
Filmmaker and Philosopher
In the Press
Medialogies pushes the boundaries of scholarship across an impressive subject range. Castillo and Egginton have constructed an adventurous set of ideas that provide challenging new insights into the ways the various media plays a key role in the formation of our contemporary reality.
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Anthony J. Cascardi,
Professor and Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of California Berkeley, USA on Medialogies
Egginton shines in his literary analysis, teasing out Cervantes’s genius in accessible prose and showing how Don Quixote paved the way for modern fiction by exploring its characters’ inner lives . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece.
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Publishers Weekly on
The Man Who Invented Fiction
Egginton devotes a large section of the book to one of the most vexing problems of our time (rampant inequality of both economic and social capital) and demonstrates the complicated and sometimes inadvertent ways in which our winner-take-all higher education system exacerbates and
locks this in.
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New York Times Book Review on The Splintering of the American Mind