Truth

A Reader

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Edited by David Wood and Jose Medina

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published January 2005, 384 pages, paper

ISBN 1405115505

Starting with a background of several important nineteenth century philosophers, this reader puts in conversation some of the main philosophical figures from the twentieth century in the analytic, continental, and pragmatist traditions.

The volume's central focus is the value or normativity of truth, explored by exposing the dialogues between different schools of thought. Topics include the normative relation between truth and subjectivity, consensus, art, testimony, power, and critique. These dialogues are as provocative as they are instructive, both in highlighting the points of convergence between philosophical traditions and in exploring their disagreements. Among the participants are Nietzsche, James, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Rorty, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, and Foucault.

This volume not only captures the most distinctive aspects of the debates on truth in the twentieth century, but also advances the philosophical discussion of truth into the twenty-first.

Contents

1. The Value of Truth: "Revaluing our highest values"
Friedrich Nietzsche: "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"
William James: "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth"

Representation, Performance and Truth-Candidacy
Soren Kierkegaard: "Truth, Subjectivity and Communication"
Ludwig Wittgenstein: On Certainty (selection)
Donald Davidson: "What Metaphors Mean"
Richard Rorty: "Representation, Social Practice, and Truth"
Hilary Putnam: "The Face of Cognition"

Truth, Consensus and Interruption
Jurgen Habermas: "The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality"
John McDowell "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity"
Richard Rorty: "Response to John McDowell"
Paul Feyerabend: "Farewell to Reason"
Jean-Francois Lyotard: "The Differend"

Disclosure and Testimony
Edmund Husserl: "Self-Evidence and Truth"
Martin Heidegger: "On the Essence of Truth"
Emmanuel Levinas: "Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony"
Catherine Z. Elgin: "Word Giving, Word Taking"

Truth and Power
Michel Foucault: "The Discourse on Language"
Linda Alcoff: "Reclaiming Truth Talk: Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary"
Hannah Arendt: "Truth in Politics"
Max Horkheimer: "On the Problem of Truth"