End of Certainty? 
Fin de certitude? 
Ende der Gewißheit? 
Our age has often been characterized as the age of the end of certainty and 
of the grand systems on which certainty has been founded. Is such a 
characterization a simple constatation, or is it a description of an actual state 
of affaires ? Or is such a characterization, rather, prescribing to reality what 
reality ought to be? What does certainty mean for our contemporary world, and 
how does the proclaimed loss of certainty manifest itself in this world? In what 
relation does certainty stand to truth, probability, doubt, and conviction ? Do 
different degrees of certainty exist ? Are there any fixed criteria of certainty 
avalilable to us ? What role does certainty play in different fields of human 
action and knowledge? 
Is uncertainty an »ontological« category, and if so, are disorder, chaos, 
accidentality, and indeterminacy its phenomenal forms ? 
While many of these questions have for a long time been a challenge to 
philosophical thought, of principal interest to us here are the following 
dimensions of the problem of certainty: 
- In what ways is certainty involved with the constitution of the subject ? 
- What is certainty's role and significance in the system of contemporary 
science? 
- In what zuays is certainty present in the universal democratic politics ? 
- In what ways is certainty inscribed in contemporary artistic practices ? 
Needles to say that we are interested in getting answers to these questions 
regarding historical as well as contemporary aspects of the problem of certainty. 
Vojislav Likar & Rado Riha