On The True Philosopher And The True Philosophy

On the True Philosopher and the True Philosophy: Essays on Swedenborg is a collection that seeks to reexamine the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg's place in the history of ideas, offering an important critique of a controversial and neglected thinker and positioning his theories in terms of contemporary philosophical debate.

Mark Jago offers a new metaphysical account of truth. He argues that to be true is to be made true by the existence of a suitable worldly entity. Truth arises as a relation between a proposition - the content of our sayings, thoughts, beliefs, and so on - and an entity (or entities) in the world.--

Blake E. Hestir's examination of Plato's conception of truth challenges a long tradition of interpretation in ancient scholarship.

The philosopher Paul Weiss once observed, "Philosophers let theories get in the way of what they and everyone else know." For many, the very word "philosophical" has become all but synonymous with "impractical". Yet whether we like it or not, almost every corner of our lives—from dissertation writing to channel surfing—brings us face to face with competing philosophies and world views, each claiming to tell us definitively what it means to be human. How can we know which one is right? And what difference does it make? To Robert McTeigue, S.J., it makes every difference in the world. Consciously or not, we all have a world view, and it decides how we live. In this book, McTeigue gives a funny and invigorating crash course in practical logic, metaphysics, anthropology, and ethics, equipping readers with a tool kit for breaking down and evaluating the thought systems—some good, some toxic—that swirl around us, and even within us. In McTeigue, classical philosophy finds a contemporary voice, accessible to the layman and engaging to the scholar. Real Philosophy for Real People is an answer to those philosophies that prize theory over truth, to any metaphysics that cannot account for itself, to anthropologies that are unworthy of the human person, and to ethical systems that reduce the great dignity and destiny of the human person. As the author insists, "A key test of any philosophy is: Can it be lived?" With Thomas Aquinas, this book teaches not only how to know the truth, but how to love it and to do it.

An analytical account of the central topics of Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, includes his views on truth and language, his perspectivism, and his doctrines of the will-to-power and the eternal recurrence.

THE question "What is truth?" is one which every philosopher ought to face, although, unfortunately, since Pontius Pilate's rather ill-timed introduction of it, it has become unfashionable to ask it. Mr. Joachim has done very well in undertaking a serious and careful discussion of the nature of truth. The advocates of any system of philosophy are too apt to assume its fundamentals as indubitable, and devote themselves to the mere development of consequences. This course is attractive, both because it is easy, and because it seems to achieve more in the way of positive construction. But, so long as disagreement on fundamentals persists, the development of consequences must appear as in the main waste labor to those who do not accept the premises. Mr. Joachim's book is valuable as an attempt to establish some of the fundamentals of the Hegelian philosophy; and, whether wholly successful or not, such an attempt is almost sure to be a help in defining the issues, and in suggesting ways of deciding them. The book discusses three different theories of the nature of truth, and then proceeds to discuss error. The first theory of truth, which is the one the plain man would naturally adopt, is that truth consists in the correspondence of our statements or beliefs with the facts. This view is open to criticism from many points of view. Mr. Joachim criticizes it on the grounds that the "correspondence" involved supposes a collection of distinct " facts," which gives too atomic a view of the world, and that there is not really such a separation of judgment and outside fact as the theory supposes. In this criticism, he assumes that everything is modified by its relations to everything else, so that no two things are really independent, and that you cannot speak quite truly about anything without speaking the whole truth about everything. The assumption that everything is modified by its relations to everything else, being rejected by the second theory of truth which Mr. Joachim examines, is defended in the course of the examination of this theory. The second theory (which is held by the present reviewer) maintains that truth is primarily a property of facts, which are something external to minds and to mind. "That the earth goes round the sun," it says, is true, independently of whether anyone thinks so, and independently of even the mere notion of its being thought. The belief that the earth goes round the sun, according to this theory, is true in a derivative sense, namely the sense that it is a belief in a facts; but the fact itself, the actual revolution of the earth round the sun, is something quite different from the belief in the fact. This theory, as Mr. Joachim points out, stands or falls with the view that "experiencing makes no difference to the facts." If I see a banker's clerk descending from a 'bus, my seeing him does not turn him into a hippopotamus, but leaves him just what he would have been if I hadn't seen him. This is denied by Mr. Joachim, on the ground that experiencing a fact is a relation to the fact, and that everything is modified by its relations. The view that everything is modified by its relations, is, of course, in one sense obviously true. But the sense in which it is assumed by Hegelians is not the sense in which it is obviously true. What they mean may, I think, be roughly expressed as follows. Suppose A is the father of B. Then, if you try to think of A without at the same time thinking of B, you are not really thinking about A at all, since paternity to B is part of A's nature. You are thinking instead of an abstraction, in which you have omitted paternity to B, which is essential to the real A. Similarly, if A, instead of being a person, is some fact which B knows, you cannot think of A without at the same time thinking of B, since "being known to B" is part of A's nature. .... -The Independent Review, Vol. 9

First published in 1966. This collection of essays dates from the first decade of this century and marks an important perio in the evolution of Bertrand Russell's thought. Russell intended the collection 'to appeal to those who take an interest in philosophical questions without having had a professional training in philosophy'- those people will find these writings just as illuminating today.