Kevin Killeen, "The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable" (Stanford UP, 2023)
New Books in Literary Studies
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The Apapophatic: A Critical Analysis of the Unknowable
The unknowable has no home in early modernity, it's a really messy inheritance. The centre of the book is an argument about natural philosophy and how science utilises resources from mysticism. When writers think about cosmology they think about subjects which are beyond the capacity for humans to imagine together. And so there is this strange borderland of science where writers come across subjects like the beginning of the world. How did it come into being? What was the not simply God snapping his fingers and the world coming into being? But what was they asked the chemical processes by which the world shaped itself into being?"
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