On the threshold of knowledge: Pythagoreans, incommensurability and the experience of modernity.
The Greek experience, as we reconstitute it, accords special value to the “limit” and reemphasizes the long-recognize scandalousness of the irrational: the indecency of that which, in measurement, is immeasurable. (He who first discovered the incommensurability of the diagonal of the square perished; he drowned in a shipwreck, for he had met with a strange […]
