John Brockman, the singular force behind the online journal of scientific avant-garde, Edge, which has offered up morsels of genius like this one, has republished a Spiegel profile of himself. An excerpt:

“He is charming, without hiding his own interests. He is proud of his life, his intelligence, without that he would have to apologize for it. He is a key figure of the late 20th and early 21st century, the éminence grise and major source of inspiration for the globally dominant culture, which he himself named as the “third culture”.

It is not Brockman, but his authors, who are well-known: Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman. Physicists, neuroscientists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, fixed stars of the science age, superstars of nonfiction bestseller lists, the reason for Brockman’s financial success and good mood.

‘These are all old friends,’ he says.

‘I’ve been their agent for decades. It’s a wonderful life: I’m doing what I love to do, I read smart books and get well-paid for it.’

The new works of his authors are next to each other in the conference room of the agency. Brockman, 73, operates out of a spacious whole floor on Fifth Avenue in New York with glass office walls and a view of the famous Flatiron Building.

These books deal with the big questions: What is man? What is the brain? What is free will? What is intelligence? And what happens when machines become smarter than humans?

Brockman likes the big issues, everything else is small talk to him.

‘Man was nothing more than a model, a technique. It is necessary to construct a new model”, he writes in his book Afterwords. ‘The human delusion lies in the belief that the human being is the basis of reality and the final goal of the evolution.’

The book first appeared in 1969 under the ingenious title By the Late John Brockman and begins with the programmatic sentence: ‘Man is dead.’

It is a small masterpiece of clear-thinking, a youthful outcry. Brockman was not even 30 at the time.

The book is aggressive, curious and prophetic and strips away the humanism of the literary mind with a Ludwig-Wittgenstein-like toughness: ‘The concept of freedom,’ he writes, ‘is simply absurd.’

The book made him briefly known, then it was forgotten. It was too early, too radical, nobody wanted to say goodbye to humans, at least not in the literary milieu.

And now with the book published in German for the first time as Afterwords, you realize that you recognize or understand some revolutions only in retrospect 30 or 40 years later.“