Till the light leaps: essays on playing attention

"In twenty-five intimate essays, D. Graham Burnett holds the reader's attention as he explores in vivid detail the questions that have been major drivers of his intellectual life. How do we know what we know? And how are we changed by the effort to know and by the work of orienting to what is known? Trained in the history and philosophy of science, Burnett has wrestled with these questions professionally. But issues so fundamental to human experience cannot be cabined by any academic discipline. These giant puzzles (of existential phenomenology, on the one hand, and the stuff of the world, on the other) permeate every aspect of human being through our lives as individuals, and our lives in community. These are the endless paradoxes that shape our understanding of time itself, and color every encounter with the objects and beings and conditions of our planet: works of art, historical artifacts, technological systems, the natural world. Each chapter in Till the Light Leaps takes up, in a different way, the inhabited experience of knowledge and the exquisite paradoxes of understanding.