2025.01.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Matti Eklund, Alien Structure: Language and Reality, Oxford University Press, 2024, 272pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198871545.
Reviewed by Nikhil Mahant, Uppsala University
In many ways, the antithesis of the familiar is not the unfamiliar. The unfamiliar can be made familiar: we can examine it, experiment with it, even put it to use. A fully developed science—or an omniscient God willing to share knowledge—will render all that is unfamiliar familiar. Its antithesis is something so incongruent and incommensurate that the very concepts, categories, and the language used to characterize the familiar fall short of describing it. Call it the alien. If you draw a Venn diagram of the familiar—and its complement, the unfamiliar—the alien extends outside the plane of the paper, possibly not even touching it.
How does one go about thinking about the alien? Alien Structure is a bold, trailblazing expedition into the territory of the alien….
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