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Jean-Luc Marion, "Negative Certainties "
English | ISBN: 0226505618 | 2015 | 288 pages | PDF | 1372 KB
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 , 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, is an invigorating work of epistemological inquiry that will take a central place in Marion's oeuvre.
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