Religion and Postmodernism
2 total works
Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world's foremost philosophers of religion as well as one of the leading Catholic thinkers of modern times. In "God Without Being", Marion challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphysics: that God, before all else, must be. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance and engaging in passionate dialogue with Heidegger, he locates a "God without Being" in the realm of agape, or Christian charity and love. If God is love, Marion contends, then God loves before he actually is. First translated into English in 1991, "God Without Being" continues to be a key book for discussions of the nature of God. This second edition contains a new preface by Marion as well as his 2003 essay on Thomas Aquinas. Offering a controversial, contemporary perspective, "God Without Being" will remain essential reading for scholars and students of philosophy and religion.
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.
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.