Sale!

Bed of Procrustes

740.00

Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

This book is currently not in stock. You are pre-ordering this book.

ISBN: 9780141969244 Categories: ,

In this profound and playful book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents his ideas about life in the form of aphorisms, the world’s earliest – and most memorable – literary form. Procrustes was a character from Greek mythology who abducted travellers and invited them to spend the night in a special bed, which they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off; those who were too short were stretched. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts – we humans, facing the limits of our knowledge, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected – and accepting what we don’t know – can we see the world as it really is.]]>

Publisher