Online research in philosophy

This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931-32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage-setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more-famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world-disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato.

Abstract: International instruments now defend a "right to the truth" for victims of political repression and violence and include truth telling about human rights violations as a kind of reparation as well as a form of redress. While truth telling about violations is obviously a condition of redress or repair for violations, it may not be clear how truth telling itself is a kind of reparations. By showing that concerted truth telling can satisfy four features of suitable reparations vehicles, I defend the idea that politically implemented modes of truth telling to, for, and by those who are victims of gross violation and injustice may with good reason be counted as a kind of reparations. Understanding the doubly symbolic character of reparations, however, makes clearer why truth telling is unlikely to be sufficient reparation for serious wrongs and is likely to be sensitive to the larger context of reparative activity and its social, political, and historical background.

This essay is a reflection on the idea of truth-making and its applications. I respond to a critique of my 1986 paper on truth-making and discuss some key principles at play in the Truth-maker Program as it has emerged over the past 25 years, paying special attention to negative and general truths. I maintain my opposition to negative and general facts, but give an improved account of how to do without them. In the end, I accept Truth-maker Maximalism and a weakened form of Truth-maker Necessitarianism, reject the assumption that truth-makers must be entities, and urge that the idea of a truth-maker be broadened and loosened so that it applies to anti-realistic as well as realistic truths.

In this article, we explore the tension between truth telling and the demands of civic life, with an emphasis on the tension between serving one's country and reporting the truth as completely and independently as possible. We argue that the principle of truth telling in journalism takes priority over the promotion of civic values, including a narrow patriotism. Even in times of war, responsible journalism must not allow a narrow patriotism to undermine its commitment to truth telling. Journalists best fulfill their civic role by adopting the perspective of a democratic patriotism. We conclude that if news organizations accept the primacy of truth telling and democratic patriotism, they should not embed reporters with military units, or if they do, they have an ethical obligation to implement special editorial precautions.

pt. 1: lecture 1. The Hindu vision of life ; lecture 2. Thucydides and the Peloponnesian war ; lecture 3. Law and rule in Sophocles' Antigone ; lecture 4. Socrates and socratic quest ; lecture 5. Plato, idealism and power : part 1 ; lecture 6. Plato, idealism and power : part 2 ; lecture 7. Aristotle's critique of Plato's Republic ; lecture 8. Machiavelli's theory of power and politics -- pt. 2: lecture 9. Rousseau's theory of human nature and society ; lecture 10. Marx's critique of capitalism and solution of communism ; lecture 11. Freud's theory of human nature and civilization ; lecture 12. Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience ; lecture 13. Dostoevsky's grand inquisitor ; lecture 14. The idea of anarchism and the example of Emma Goldman ; lecture 15. Hitler's use of power ; lecture 16. Gandhi's use of power.

On the one hand, most of us would take honesty to be a key ethical virtue. Corporations and other organizations often include it in their codes of ethics, we legislate against various forms of dishonesty, we tend to be ashamed (or at least defensive) when we are caught not telling the truth, and honesty is often regarded as a key element in relationships. Yet on the other hand, dishonesty, that is, lying and deceit, seems to be commonplace in contemporary public life even amongst those leading figures in our society whom we might otherwise take to be the exemplars of public virtue. So, is the emphasis on truth and honesty just a sham? Does the fact of our actual practice mean that truth and honesty matter only rhetorically, and, if so, does that mean that whatever it is we mean by ‘ethics,’ truth and honesty are not a part of it? What I will suggest is that truth is indeed central to ethical practice, and not only to ethical practice, but also to a properly democratic politics, and that the apparent breakdown in the commitment to truth in public life is indicative of a deeper ethical, as well as political, breakdown.

We, the faculty of this great university, are all specialists of one kind or another –economists, physicists, historians, philosophers, poets. Necessarily then, we are the masters of rarefied techniques of inquiry and expression peculiar to our disciplines. But if we were no more than that, we should have failed our students, and ourselves. We are also intellectuals, and citizens. We bear the citizen's duty to engage the problems of this society, and the intellectual's responsibility to speak what truth he is given to know about them.