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The Principle of Radical Uncertainty

Lev Shestov and the Liberation from Rational Foundations

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The Principle of Radical Uncertainty

By: Boris Kriger
Narrated by: Andrew Grover
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What if human life has no secure foundation—no ultimate law, no necessity, no rational guarantee? For Lev Shestov (1866–1938), the most unsettling of Russian existential thinkers, philosophy’s dream of certainty was an illusion born of fear. Against the entire Western tradition from Plato to Kant and Hegel, he proclaimed that existence is groundless: fragile, paradoxical, exposed to the abyss of uncertainty.

This book presents Shestov’s thought as a radical alternative to systems of reason and necessity. Engaging Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Levinas, and Derrida, it explores how groundlessness undermines the certainties of science, politics, and morality, while opening the path to authentic freedom, responsibility, and even faith.

The Principle of Radical Uncertainty argues that Shestov was not a marginal eccentric but a prophetic voice for our own age of crisis. In a world shaken by the fragility of knowledge, the illusions of political security, and the uncertainties of technology and climate, his philosophy reminds us that the collapse of foundations is not the end of thought but the beginning of liberation.

©2025 Boris Kriger (P)2025 Boris Kriger
Ethics & Morality Philosophy
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