The Birth of Reason

In The Birth of Reason Louis Dudek establishes the link between ancient pre-Socratic Atomism and modern quantum mechanics. In characteristically unencumbered terms, Dudek shows how this revolutionary philosophy, the invention of thinkers from Ioanian Greek trading cities, has been consistently misrepresented and resisted. Atomism nevertheless marks the transition from primitive mythological thinking (mythos) to the abstract, concept-based rationality (logos) that informs our modern approach to an ultimately unknowable reality.

This essay “is a kind of summation of myself – gnothi seaut’Äîn…. I am neither a materialist nor a theist, really, nor am I altogether an agnostic. As I say in [the] essay, ‘the ultimate reality is unknowable,’ but I am sure that if it were knowable it would satisfy both the materialist and the theist, and much more that we cannot imagine.”

“If anyone could make the Ionian skeptics palatable to a generation raised on music and television, it’s Louis Dudek.” – The Ottawa Citizen

“…the highlight is … 39 fragments from the pre-Socratics that Dudek astutely describes as reading ‘like a philosophical poem.’” – The Montreal Gazette

“…includes the thesis that the scientific conception of the universe … is the most advanced stage of religious evolution.” – Canadian Book Review Annual

AUTHOR

Louis Dudek

Louis Dudek, born in Montreal, was educated both at McGill and Columbia University. In New York, as a young poet, he corresponded extensively with Ezra Pound. Back in Montreal, he joined the McGill faculty, where his lectures on literature became legendary. In combination with other key figures in the first and second waves of Canadian poetic modernism, he commenced many of the most important small magazines and literary presses of the mid-century. As a writer, critic, and cultural observer, his career has been dedicated to ongoing intellectual and artistic discussion. Justly identified as Canada’s premier man of letters, Dudek died in 2001.

Reviews

“If anyone could make the Ionian skeptics palatable to a generation raised on music and television, its Louis Dudek.” — The Ottawa Citizen “…the highlight is … 39 fragments from the pre-Socratics that Dudek astutely describes as reading like a philosophical poem.” — The Montreal Gazette “…includes the thesis that the scientific conception of the universe … is the most advanced stage of religious evolution.” — Canadian Book Review Annual