A new exploration of our understanding of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers.

How do we comprehend the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a few dramatic turning points, or are they a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections truly transformative, or just arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?

In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman demonstrates that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is composed of sudden jumps, or laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – influences every area of human life. Moreover, this paradox is as old as human thought itself.

Exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.

To examine the relationship between the continuous and the discrete is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world we live in.

Pages: 416, Dimensions: 16.2x16.2cm