The Truth And Untruth Of Language

In this study, Gert-Jan van der Heiden shows that this hermeneutic understanding of the relation between truth, untruth, and language can be clarified by inquiring into the meaning of two notions: disclosure and displacement. Unconcealment and hiding, truth and untruth, disclosure and displacement are the key notions to understanding the various conceptions of language in contemporary approaches to hermeneutics in continental philosophy. By painting a picture of the different meanings of these concepts in the work of Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida, illuminating the differences and affinities of their respective projects, he finds an original way of showing how these three thinkers mutually discuss the relation between truth and language.

Jennifer Saul presents a close analysis of the distinction between lying to others and misleading them, which sheds light on key debates in philosophy of language and tackles the widespread moral preference for misleading over lying. She establishes a new view on the moral significance of the distinction, and explores a range of historical cases.

"On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense") is an (initially) unpublished work of Friedrich Nietzsche written in 1873, one year after The Birth of Tragedy. It deals largely with epistemological questions of truth and language, including the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases-which means, strictly speaking, never equal-in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. According to Paul F. Glenn, Nietzsche is arguing that "concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality." Although all concepts are human inventions (created by common agreement to facilitate ease of communication), human beings forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe that they are "true" and do correspond to reality. Thus Nietzsche argues that "truth" is actually: A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. These ideas about truth and its relation to human language have been particularly influential among postmodern theorists, and "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" is one of the works most responsible for Nietzsche's reputation (albeit a contentious one) as "the godfather of postmodernism."

Newly translated and edited by Taylor Carman, On Truth and Untruth charts Nietzsche’s evolving thinking on truth, which has exerted a powerful influence over modern and contemporary thought. This original collection features the complete text of the celebrated early essay “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” (“a keystone in Nietzsche’s thought” —Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), as well as selections from the great philosopher’s entire career, including key passages from The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Power, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist.

Presenting the entire text of Nietzsche's lectures on rhetoric and language and his notes for them, as well as a translation of the German and of the Greek and Latin examples, this book fills an important gap in the philosopher's corpus unknown to many Nietzsche scholars.

Philosophers have been thinking about lying for several thousand years, yet this topic has only recently become a central area of academic interest for philosophers of language, epistemologists, ethicists, and political philosophers. Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, Politics provides the first dedicated collection of philosophical essays on the emerging topic of lying. Adopting an inter-subdisciplinary approach, this volume breaks new methodological ground in exploring the ways that a better understanding of language can inform the study of knowledge, ethics, or politics - and vice-versa. How can we lie when it is unclear what exactly we believe, or when we have contradictory beliefs? Can corporations lie, and if so how? Is lying always wrong, or always at least prima facie wrong? What can one learn from a liar? Can we lie to mindless machines? These engaging questions and many more are explored at length in this accessible reference text.

Reexamines the good, tracing the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, and interpreting the good as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts.