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Negative Certainties

Jean-Luc Marion author Stephen E Lewis translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:29th Sep '15

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Negative Certainties cover

In Negative Certainties, renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple-but profoundly provocative-question in order to open up an entirely new way of thinking about knowledge: Isn't our uncertainty, our finitude and rational limitations, one of the few things we can be certain about? Marion shows how the assumption of knowledge as positive demands a reductive epistemology that disregards immeasurable or disorderly phenomena. He shows that we have experiences every day that have no identifiable causes or predictable reasons, and that these constitute a very real knowledge-a knowledge of the limits of what can be known. Establishing this "negative certainty," Marion applies it to four aporias, or issues of certain uncertainty: the definition of man; the nature of God; the unconditionality of the gift; and the unpredictability of events. Translated for the first time into English, Negative Certainties is an invigorating work of epistemological inquiry that will take a central place in Marion's oeuvre.

ISBN: 9780226505619

Dimensions: 24mm x 17mm x 2mm

Weight: 652g

288 pages