Week 1: Via negativa
The opening lecture — the thesis for the whole semester, stated once, and the case for taking a course built entirely out of other people's cuts
22 February 2027
Theologians have a name for describing something only by what it isn’t: via negativa, the negative way. Pseudo-Dionysius used it for God, because anything you say positively about the infinite is already too small. This course borrows the move and points it at everything else — a scroll, a sentence, a proof, a building, a scene, an argument — on the theory that the same trick shows up whenever a discipline gets serious about restraint, and that noticing it is a transferable skill.
Nassim Taleb calls the modern, secular version “subtractive knowledge”: we are often more certain about what doesn’t work than what does, and a lot of expertise is really accumulated omission. The semester tests that claim against harder cases than Taleb’s — a religious tradition that built an entire vocabulary out of negation, centuries before anyone needed the word for a diet.
Outline#
- what “via negativa” meant before it meant a diet book
- the shape of the semester: twelve disciplines, one question each week — what did leaving this out cost, and what did it buy?
- the three assessments, and why the biggest one asks you to build an argument that depends on what you don’t say
- what to bring to Wednesday’s seminar
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — Convenor