Yannik Ehmer: Knotted Knowledge, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

In contrast to dominant scholarship, which typically reads Prov 10: 1-22: 16 as an unstructured collection of isolated sayings, Yannik Ehmer questions the primacy of the individual proverb and its implications for reconstructing the intellectual history of ancient Israel. He offers a philological and philosophical rereading of Prov 10: 1-22: 16, aiming to identify the collection's compositional logics as a meta-poetic phenomenon through a transdisciplinary method. What has long been treated as a corpus of loosely arranged sayings is reinterpreted here as a carefully crafted configuration of "knotted knowledge."

Engaging with the phenomenology of Michel Serres and drawing on the emic category of the knot, the author develops a phenomenology of knotted knowledge that foregrounds ambiguity as its central feature. In this perspective, proverbial wisdom appears as an alternative mode of constructing philosophy and theology, in which epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics are not separated domains but mutually implicated dimensions of thought.

The prevailing evolutionary model - according to which proverbial wisdom represents a naïvely optimistic starting point on a trajectory culminating in the critical wisdom of Qohelet - is critically reassessed. Instead, Prov 10: 1-22: 16 is understood as a dynamic textual archive in which wisdom is continuously both done and undone in order to produce ambiguity. A close philological analysis elucidates its compositional techniques and iterative dynamics, which are then integrated into a broader philosophical interpretation. Read as "knotted knowledge," the text opens a revised perspective on the history of wisdom: rather than a linear progression from simplicity to complexity, it already exhibits a form of second-order thinking within proverbial wisdom itself.