Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Book

At the heart of Truth and Truthfulness lie a number of questions about truth. What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? Bernard Williams sets out to answer these questions by identifying two prominent and conflicting currents of ideas in modern thought and culture. On the one hand there is the commitment to truthfulness and on the other there is a pervasive suspicion about truth itself. The suspicion amounts to a questioning of the idea that there is such a thing as truth and, if there is, a doubt as to whether it can be more than subjective or relative. The commitment to the idea of truthfulness on the other hand relates to what Williams calls "the two basic virtues of truth", which he calls Accuracy and Sincerity: "you do the best you can to acquire true beliefs, and what you say reveals what you believe." The tension between truthfulness and truth is, Williams suggests, expressed in a familiar contrast between two different and opposed ways of doing philosophy. Williams highlights the strengths and weaknesses of both positions while giving his own virtuoso philosophical display during the course of the book. The real problems for the reader begin with the overall explanatory framework. Having differentiated between "truth" and "truthfulness" and between the two different philosophical outlooks Williams states that his main concern throughout is with what "may summarily be called 'the value of truth'". It is with the introduction of this term that the equivocation--between "truth" understood as a philosophical term (the idea of "truth itself") and "truthfulness" understood as a virtue, or set of virtues--begins. Williams talks as if "truth itself" and the virtue of truthfulness, while conceptually distinct, are somehow all of a piece. It is one thing to say, with Williams, that we (as individuals and as a society) stand to lose a great deal (and "possibly everything") if the virtues of being truthful were discarded throughout western liberal democracies. But it is quite another to say that to stop talking about "truth itself" would mean the end of liberal democracy. In other words it is difficult to share Williams' conviction that something as big and important as the fate of liberal democracy might depend on the resolution of these philosophical disputes. For all the impressive display of philosophical expertise Williams' way of mapping the present philosophical terrain is not as useful as he might have hoped and the book as a whole requires a good deal of time and sustained concentration to get through to the end. Try reading Rorty's Truth and Progress alongside Williams' Truth and Truthfulness for illuminating contrast effects. --Larry BrownRead More

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  • Amazon

    Explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine. This book identifies two basic virtues of truth, accuracy and sincerity. It describes different psychological and social forms that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense of them.

  • Foyles

    What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine. Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of being deceived (no one wants to be fooled) and skepticism that objective truth exists at all (no one wants to be naive). This tension between a demand for truthfulness and the doubt that there is any truth to be found is not an abstract paradox. It has political consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual activities, particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces. Williams's approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, blends philosophy, history, and a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. Without denying that we should worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted, he defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value.He identifies two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity, the first of which aims at finding out the truth and the second at telling it. He describes different psychological and social forms that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense of them today. Truth and Truthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. Bernard Williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything.

  • 0691117918
  • 9780691117911
  • Bernard Williams
  • 2 February 2004
  • Princeton University Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 344
  • New edition
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