  It is this commitment to upholding the importance of reason — and its fruits, knowledge and certainty — that lies at the core of Saadya's  main philosophical text, the Kitâb al-Amânât wal-'I‘tiqâdât, or The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs (known in Samuel Ibn Tibbon's Hebrew translation as Sefer ha-'Emûnôt ve-ha-Deôt). In what follows, we will refer to this text as the Amânât. In this magnum opus, Saadya aims to move people beyond the various epistemological and existential paralyses through which they are consigned to living always and only in the shadows of error and doubt.  Concerned to help cure this distinctive human ill, Saadya hopes to provide people instead with truth and certainty — the grounds for right living. And so, following upon an opening passage of epistemological praise to “the Lord, the God of Israel, to whom the truth is known with absolute certainty,” Saadya begins the Amânât, with a statement of his work's epistemological purpose: