''The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought'' is a book on

Modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

by historian

William Everdell William Romeyn Everdell is an American teacher and author. Biography Born in 1941, he graduated from St. Paul's School and from Princeton University. A Woodrow Wilson Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, he holds a master's degree in History from Har ...

, published in 1997 by the

University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including ''The Chicago Manual of Style'', ...

. A ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' Notable Book of 1997, and included by the New York Public Library on its list of "25 Books to Remember from 1997," ''The First Moderns'' suggests that "the heart of Modernism is the postulate of ontological discontinuity."

Background and overview

Everdell, Dean of Humanities at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, posits that Modernism first emerged in the field of mathematics rather than the arts, specifically in the work of German mathematician Richard Dedekind, who, in 1872, demonstrated that mathematicians operate without a continuum; this represents the formalization of Everdell's axiom of "ontological discontinuity," which he goes on to examine in a multiplicity of contexts. He examines this emerging framework of discreteness in science (

Ludwig Boltzmann Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (; 20 February 1844 – 5 September 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of ther ...

's mechanics, Cajal's neuroscience,

Hugo de Vries Hugo Marie de Vries () (16 February 1848 – 21 May 1935) was a Dutch botanist and one of the first geneticists. He is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while apparently unaware o ...

's conception of the gene and

Max Planck Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (, ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical p ...

's quantum work,

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

's physics); mathematics, logic, and philosophy (

Georg Cantor Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor ( , ; – January 6, 1918) was a German mathematician. He played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of ...

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...

and the linguistic turn,

Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...

and the beginnings of

phenomenology Phenomenology may refer to: Art * Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties Philosophy * Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...

); in addition to the arts (

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

's novels, Picasso's ''Demoiselles D'Avignon'', Schoenberg's twelve-tone music).

Reviews

Critics largely reviewed ''The First Moderns'' favorably, appreciating Everdell's interdisciplinary approach, in publications including the ''New York Review of Books'', the ''New York Times,'' the ''Los Angeles Times,'' and the ''Washington Post''. Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic

Michael Dirda Michael Dirda (born 1948) is a book critic for the ''Washington Post''. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Career Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree in 1970, Dirda took an M.A. in 1974 a ...

considers it among his "favorites."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:First Moderns Modernism 1997 non-fiction books Art history books History of mathematics History of philosophy History of literature Modernity