The apophatic theme of the hidden God in Shestov’s and Derrida’s discussions on the gift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘God is dead’, Lev Shestov (1866–1938) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) attempted to rethink Judeo-Christian theological and philosophical traditions by trying to free the relation to God from pretences of finite concepts and limitations of knowledge. In the second half of the twentieth century, the problematic discourse of the so-called ‘paradox of the gift’ became the key question of apophatic theology. The philosophers of postmodern culture related the Christian theology of the gift to the apophatic theme of the hidden and the post-Heideggerian view of God as a Being. United in their pursuit of the ‘mystical experience’ of unknowing and ‘the possibility of the impossible’, Shestov’s and Derrida’s thoughts were concerned with the state of human relations to God in contemporary Western culture. However, Shestov’s legend about the divine gift of the Angel of Death and Derrida’s analysis of the gift in relation to the phenomenon of revelation and death had different ends in mind. Situating Shestov’s ideas within the context of postmodern encounters with the gift and the apophatic theme of God, the article is the first known attempt at a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ ideas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".