Negative Certainties

Now in paperback, Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking philosophy of human uncertainty.

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.

Author: Jean-Luc Marion
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 01/04/2024
Series: Religion and Postmodernism
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780226829487