Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can be understood as a symptom of our civilization's discontent, born of regret that we are no longer able to experience our world as a cosmos that assigns us our place. But dissatisfaction with the modern world may also spring from a conviction that modernism has failed to confront the challenge of an inevitably open future. Such conviction has frequently led to a critique of modernity's founding heroes. Challenging that critique, Harries insists that modernity is supported by nothing other than human freedom.But more important to Harries is to show how modernist self-assertion is shadowed by nihilism and what it might mean to step out of that shadow. Looking at a small number of medieval and Renaissance texts, as well as some paintings, he uncovers the threshold that separates the modern from the premodern world. At the same time, he illuminates that other, more questionable threshold, between the modern and the postmodern.Two spirits preside over the book: Alberti, the Renaissance author on art and architecture, whose passionate interest in perspective and point of view offers a key to modernity; and Nicolaus Cusanus, the fifteenth-century cardinal, whose work shows that such interest cannot be divorced from speculations on the infinity of God. The title Infinity and Perspective connects the two to each other and to the shape of modernity.

卡斯滕•哈里斯（Karsten Harries）,1937年生于德国耶拿。美国耶鲁大学哲学博士,现为耶鲁大学哲学系教授,研究领域包括艺术哲学、建筑哲学、现象学、现代早期哲学等。近年来主要关注主导科学技术的客观化理性的正当性和限度问题。其主要著作有：《真理：世界的构造》（ Wahrheit: Die Architektur der Welt,2012）、《艺术关系重大：海德格尔<艺术作品的起源>评注》（Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”,2009）、《虚无主义与信仰之间：<非此即彼>评注》（Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or,2010）、《无限与视角》（Infinity and Perspective,2001）、《建筑的伦理功能》（The Ethical Function of Architecture,1997）、《现代艺术的意义》（The Meaning of Modern Art,1968）等等,编著有《马丁•海德格尔：艺术、政治与技术》（Martin Heidegger: Kunst, Politik, Technik,1992）。