Thinking through Error

In Thinking Through Error, Professor Antomarini seeks to free our thought from self-pre-empting truths: truths that depend upon our making invidious comparisons with error. Antomarini redefines error as a mental act that is pre-requisite to our engaging experience as a compelling voyage of discovery. She makes a convincing case for claiming that the knowledge we gain by risking knowledge of the truth re-invigorates philosophical inquiry in general. Her 'risky' speculations enhance the prospects for human creativity both within and without the realm of the aesthetic. This is a book with broad interdisciplinary appeal for anyone who has contemplated the possibility that error might be a pathway to knowledge rather than an impediment to knowledge. -- Alan Singer, director, secondary education social studies department of teaching, literacy and leadership, Hofstra University, New York
Thinking Through Error is a vital and original work. Studying our gestures of knowing, and exploring how we can observe patterns emergent in irregular phenomena, Brunella Antomarini reveals the many ways error is a stimulus to thought. Her case studies range from Catherine of Siena's theological politics to recent developments in chaos theory. Error is central, Antomarini shows, to "the enormous wealth of information," both visible and invisible, observable and intuited, that we bring to the everyday world. In the end she indicates how that world is "made for us and not in spite of us." -- Susan Stewart, Princeton University