The cover art for Maurice Weyembergh's monograph shows an aerial photograph of a man trapped in a giant maze. He tries to see beyond the entrapping walls, but they are too high, and the farther he looks, the darker it gets. Is there a way out? And should one even bother to search for it? This photo by Stewart Sutton perfectly illustrates the issues debated by Weyembergh in his wide-ranging study. The maze represents the path that will lead humans into (...) the future and bears the burden or "the absolutism of reality," as the title states. By evoking the terminology of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, Weyembergh analyzes the constraints of reality and humans' efforts to improve their life span and, possibly... (shrink)

The cover art for Utopies des Lumières is quite simple but very effective, just like the texts that the collection contains. The cover is mostly plain, but it includes a fragment of Thomas More’s map of the island of Utopia. Inside, six chapters of varying length and interest are divided into three parts dealing mostly with three questions that are also integral to the concerns of the genre of utopia as defined by More: Where is utopia? What does utopia bring? (...) What can it accomplish?Indeed, part 1 consists of a discussion of the geographic question of utopia captivatingly prompted by the chapters by Peter Fitting and Kate Turner. Both chapters reinforce the role of imagination, but while Fitting’s... (shrink)