(Jewish philosopher, 882-942)
The truth of reliable tradition and its relation to rational truth
Saadia set out to remove the doubt and error surrounding the Jewish people’s understanding of the scriptures, in order that they might “live truly and with certainty.” Truth and certainty are the fruits of reason; therefore throughout his work Saadia provided explanations based on reason, working inductively from Scripture.
Saadia grieved over the fact that in his time many of the believers were clinging to unsound doctrine while many of those who deny the faith boast of their unbelief and despise the men of truth, although they are themselves in error. Throughout his work Saadia discussed the relationship between reason and revelation. He analyzed four modes of “knowing”: knowledge from sense perception, knowledge from reason, knowledge from inference and knowledge from tradition. While the first three types of knowledge came about through a gradual process, knowledge from tradition was a reliable report or testimony, which could be understood immediately by the recipient, and which could immediately be understood as certain truth. Saadia identified scripture and rabbinic law as tradition, revealed by God to Moses and the prophets.
He distinguished between two types of laws in the Bible: “laws of reason” and “laws of revelation.” Laws of reason are commandments and prohibitions whose importance could be arrived at independently by any rational human being, such as prohibitions against murder, adultery, theft and dishonesty. Saadia explained that these laws governed situations about which God had “implanted” approval or disapproval in the reason of man. The “laws of revelation” concerned matters on which reason alone passed no judgement, such as the laws about keeping the Sabbath and festival days, Jewish dietary laws, laws about purity and impurity, etc.
Saadia indicated a direct correlation between the ability to reason and the ability to receive revelation. He claims that God knew that His laws and the stories of His wondrous signs would, through the passage of time, require people to hand them down to posterity, so that they might become as evident to later generations as they were to the earlier ones. Therefore, He prepared in our minds a place for the acceptance of reliable tradition and in our souls a quiet corner for trusting it so that His Scriptures and stories should remain safely with us.
*See Altmann, Alexander. “Saadya's Theory of Revelation: Its Origin and Background,” in Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.
(Contemporary English Chief Rabbi)
Sachs’ thesis is that there is a difference between God and religion. God is God of all humanity, but no single faith is or should be the faith of all humanity. Only in such perspective can we see the presence of God in people of other faiths. One must distinguish between the particularity of cultures and the universality of the human condition. It follows that religious truth is not universal but will manifest itself in different forms.
Sachs stresses nonetheless that this does not mean that religous truth is relative. He explains that there is a difference, all to often ignored, between absoluteness and universality. A father may have an absolute obligation by his child, but it is not a universal one. It is not that truth is relative. It is only that no single set of human words, no finite language system, no matter how sophisticated, can say it all, can encapsulate the whole of the divine-human interchange of one set of propositions or , indeed, narratives.
We must leave “space” for the truth – i.e. the moral and existential validity of the religious “other” – even as we hold firmly to our separate, albeit not necessarily “ equal”, faith traditions. One must show respect for “the dignity of difference”, for the “stranger”, the religious other….
Holding to the absolute veracity and reliability of truth-claims of one’s own religious tradition, embodied in one’s own historical community, while being open to an alternative expression of “eternal truth” in other, humanly limited but perhaps divinely ordained, religious traditions – this is indeed the great struggle of every religious or philosophical tradition in today’s shrinking world.
Sachs’ basic message is that we encounter God in the face of a stranger. It is God himself who creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we greet God.
* Sachs, Jonathan, The Dignity of Difference: how to avoid the clash of cvilisations, Continuum, London , 2002)
( Indian Christian Monk, b. 1955)
The eternal truth can never be limited to a historical truth.
John Martin Sahajananda, a monk at the Shantivanam Ashram in South India, embraces the insights of the Indian religious traditions to deliver a profound vision for the renewal of Christianity.
According to him, in order to understand the place of religions we need to understand the nature of Truth. Truth has two aspects: the eternal aspect and the historical aspect. When Moses asked God about his name, first God said that “I am what I am,” but it was difficult for Moses to understand this eternal aspect of Truth so God revealed to him his historical aspect: “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
The historical aspect of Truth or God is manifested in time and space and it is present in the sacred scriptures. The historical manifestation of Truth is conditioned. The eternal truth can never be limited to a historical truth. The eternal truth always transcends the historical truth. The historical truth cannot bring unity among the religions or humanity. Only the eternal truth can do that.
Historical truth is like a nest where we are born, where we are protected, nourished and given security until the wings are grown that allow us to fly into the freedom of the infinite space. Eternal truth can never be put into laws or religious beliefs and structures. The difficulty comes when we transform the nest into a cage and imprison ourselves in the cage of historical truth.
Hence there is a constant need for humanity to move from the historical truth into the eternal truth. The historical truth creates an ego and can thus become an obstacle. In order to move from the historical truth into the eternal truth, we need to see the limitations of the historical truth. Only when we see clearly the limitations of the historical truth or religions can we open ourselves to the eternal truth.
Sahajananda, John Martin, The Hindu Christ, O books, 2006
(Indian Christian theologian, 1920 -2000)
In Asian situations where sat (truth) is both being and truth, the goal of the quest for truth is to close the gap between thinking and being. In an “either-or” mind-set, there is a desperate attempt to keep “being” and “knowing” distinct because of the high value placed on the individual ego. Today there is a rather general consensus that truth can no more be defined in terms of exclusion. A religion that defines itself to be true by excluding others is outmoded. There is a global consciousness that different cultures are drawn together into one community. Truth is not concerned with “an Unmoved Mover” waiting to be discovered, but with a “Moving Mover” involved in the historic process, but transcending it. The apprehension of truth at a given point in history cannot claim exclusive validity. It can indeed be valid but not exclusive. No particular response to or formulation of Truth can claim to be unique, final or absolute. We need to grow in truth. The truth received by a particular community of faith can prove itself to be true not by rejecting but by relating itself to the truth perceived by neighbours of other faiths. Therefore Christology, for Christians, is not only a joyful acceptance of the truth revealed in Jesus Christ but also a pilgrimage towards the fullness of truth.
Unfortunately the demand for clear-cut expression of truth has often lead to a dependence on words, concepts and rational formulations. Then creeds become substitute for truth and confessions prevent conversations. One forgets that Truth is always greater the formulation of truth. On this point there is a striking contrast between the Christian and the Hindu-Buddhist attitudes. . There are no “heretics” in India in the Western sense of the term. Unfortunately the “either/or” way of thinking and its dependence on credential formulations has made it difficult for Christianity to co-exist with people of other faiths.
Samartha advocates the pluralism of religious truths. Pluralism for him does not relativize Truth. It relativizes different responses to Truth which are conditioned by history and culture. It rejects the claim of any particular response to be absolute. The acknowledgment that no one can hold the truth in the palm of his or her hand is the basic orientation of sound religious pluralism. Truth is not identical with our truth claims.
* Samartha, S.J. Towards a Revised Christology, Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis book, 1991
(Ancient Indian philosophical system)
Contrary to the viewpoints adopted by Mimansa and Nyaya philosophies (see Mimansa and Nyaya), Samkhya philosophy holds the view of the intrinsic validity and invalidity of knowledge. Truth and falsity are inherent in knowledge. A knowledge is made true and false - and known to be true and false - by the conditions of knowledge itself. Knowledge must have its validity on its own account., must be self-evident. There is no need to have recourse to any criteria to ascertain the truth or falsehood of assertions.
The Samkhya view of the intrinsic truth and falsehood of knowledge is understandable once it is seen as an application of the Samkhya’s theory of causation that is, sat-karya-vada. According to this doctrine, causation is only a manifestation of the effect that pre-exists potentially in the cause. A cause can produce only that effect inherent in the causal complex. The effect is a reflection of the cause. Therefore the truth and the falsity of cognitions are causally determined effects of the cognitions themselves. They are to be explained by knowledge itself not by something external to it. Truth and falsehood are inherent in knowledge. Truth can only issue from truth and falsehood from falsehood.
According to the Nyaya and Mimansa philosophies the Samkhya view of causation as satkaryavada is senseless because the effect is always somewhat different from the cause. How can validity and invalisity belong to the same thing, in this case, to knowledge, apart from external conditions? If the validity of knowledge is self-evident, how is that there are unsuccessful activities? Illusions are frequent experiences. Validity and invalidity of knowledge are not self-evident, but need the support external criteria.
* Chatterjee S.C., The Nyaya Theory of Knowledge, University of Calcutta, 1939, p.83-120
(Spanish-American philosopher and writer,1863-1952)
The word 'truth' should be reserved for what everybody spontaneously means by it : the standard comprehensive description of any fact in all its relations. Truth is not an opinion because of the limitation in scope of every human opinion. Rather the truth is the field which various true opinions traverse in various directions, and not opinion itself. Truth is not in pure intuition or perception: having no object other than the datum, it can neither be true or false. Similarly truth is irrelevant to dialectic. Logic and mathematics are not true inherently, however cogent or extensive. Systems of essences are more or less fortunate and harmonious , but not at all true or false. Truth is not true discourse because discourse is an event, it has a date whereas truth is dateless. The eternity of truth is inherent in it: all truths are equally eternal. It is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions, the past and the future are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun. Truth is an essence involved in positing any fact, in remembering, expecting or asserting anything. No truth need to be acknowledged if there is no existence, yet on the hypothesis that anything exists, truth has appeared. The complete description of existence, covering all its relations, will be the truth about it. No argument is necessary to support the eternal truth.
Some people identify truth with their own tenets, they want to express how certain they feel in their beliefs. But there are no eternal tenets: neither the opinions of men, nor anything existent can be eternal: eternity is a property of essences only. Truth is eternal and dateless, but not timeless, because, being descriptive of existence, it is a picture of change. Truth is frozen history. Eternal truth is a synthetic image of time. Still it is more than that because it contains also everything that is not temporal at all. The whole realm of essence is the whole realm of truth.
* Santayana, G., Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, New york, 1955, p.262-271
(American linguists, 1884-1939, 1897-1941)
The 'real world' is unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group: the illusion of ‘objective’ truth.
The thesis of linguistic determinism is the view that the language people speak determines the way they perceive the world. All observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar. Such is the thesis named after the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ''real world'' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that a person's language, through its vocabulary and structure, shapes the way that person perceives reality, thinks and behaves. There is broad truth in the argument that language plays a role in shaping reality. Nonetheless several critics have pointed out that this view of linguistic determinism should not be overstated and collapse into extreme relativism: there seem also to be linguistic universals, or features common to every language; and words are often invented to reflect, rather than construct new phenomena in reality. The so-called "strong hypothesis" of Sapir-Whorf (that language determines thought) is mostly debunked, but the "weak hypothesis" (that language influences thought) is quite arguably true at least in some situations, and there is significant debate over the extent of how true it is and in what situations it is true.
It is obvious that at least some of us are capable of thinking "outside the box" of language when we make a conscious effort. We are capable of inventing new nouns and verbs to express ourselves if need be. So linguistic determinism must be rejected. But if it is merely a question of whether or not language influences thought, especially in realms such as philosophy and religion, where the mind contemplates abstractions or intangible and unseen realities, probably very few linguists would care to deny that language plays a very important role.
* Whorf, Benjamin; Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (John Carroll, Editor) ; 1956; MIT Press
(French philosopher, 1905-1980)
1. According to Sartre, existence precedes essence and that means that man is not definable because first he is ‘no-thing’: he will be what he will make of himself. He is such as he conceives himself and wants himself to become. He is totally responsible for his own existence because there are no truths that precede him. He will be his own truth, accepting to be totally free ‘for nothing’.
There is no source of truth to which he can turn to provide meaning to his life. He determines his own essence only by temporary, transient choices of what he would like to become. Impossible to turn to God as a foundation for truth and virtue, since “God is dead”, and there are no substitute realms of truth and value is to be found in philosophy, science or religion. The individual alone is the source of whatever meaning, truth, or value the world has.
Being “condemned to be free”, man is utterly responsible for his actions. He has no recourse to signs, clues and truths that would direct him, because he is himself the decoder of the signs that please him and the foundation of his own truth. He has to invent himself at every moment. He cannot decide a priori what he has to do. He makes himself in choosing. He is the sole foundation of his being, the sole foundation of his ‘truth’. This means that there is no “Truth”. The common sense concepts of true and false does not seem to have any place in Sartre’s existentialism.
2. Nonetheless Sartre makes a distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence, between people of good faith and people of bad faith. Therefore he introduces a kind of distinction between a true way of life and a false one. The dichotomy of true/false is implicitly contained in this assumption. Sartre writes that the man of “bad faith” considers his freedom as a dreadful freedom. He does not want to be ‘condemned to freedom’. He finds it hard to endure his total responsibility. He longs not to be condemned to freedom and he would wish to be simply a thing, a being-in-itself like a stone. This is what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’, generated by the attempts to escape from freedom in pretending that human affairs are unavoidable and necessary. Bad faith is self-deception and inauthenticity as it amounts to a rejection of the freedom that constitutes human subjectivity.
Thus Sartre feels entitled to pass judgment on certain choices: some are founded on error and others on truth. A man of bad faith, the inauthentic man, according to Sartre, cannot escape to a judgement of truth because his lie dissimulates his total freedom of action. He is in bad faith if he declares that certain values pre-exist him and that there is a truth that precedes him.
But then the question arises what is ‘good faith’ and how good faith is possible for conscious beings? Sartre has given only one principle for our action: to avoid bad faith, to repudiate acting inauthentically. But to follow the rule to repudiate inauthenticiy, we must know the positive meaning of authenticity. As a matter of fact, Sartre’s definition of authenticity has not provided any justification for choosing A rather than B: our choice is therefore arbitrary, it is simply our choice. The rule ‘Avoid bad faith’ or ‘ Choose authentically’ simply tells us to acknowledge our freedom in choosing. Critics have pointed out that this is not a morally significant rule, it is an empty rule, it contains no content as to what is morally worth anything. This shows that the important point for Sartre is to remain in state where choosing is always possible. Choosing what? Anything…as “all human activities are equivalent”. Sartre’s only rule, only “truth” is to remain in a state where choosing is always possible.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’Etre et le Néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943; L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, Nagel, Paris, 1946
(Swiss linguist, 1857-1913)
Saussure's science of linguistics – which has greatly influenced postmodernist thought – refutes the claim of common sense that the world is made up of independently existing things that naturally fit the names we have given them. We usually take for granted that there is something about a rose that makes the word "rose" inevitably the right one. But, according to Saussure, there is no direct or causal relation between a rose and the letters r-o-s-e. Any other collection of letters could conceivably have done the job just as well. It is purely a matter of social convention that roses are called roses. Thus Saussure argued against the assumption that language is made up of individual units that have natural attachments to objects and ideas. His contention is radical because of the way it seems to overthrow realism (the view that there is a real world out there that can be known by the human mind) and to replace it with a linguistic relativism (what we can know is the system of concepts generated by the arbitrary structures of language).
Because he found that there is no natural or inevitable bond between words and things, Saussure saw language as an arbitrary system. From this starting point, his structuralist theory abandons any question of the "truth" of language: it argues that language can never be a transparent or innocent reflection of reality.
Language provides no direct access to reality because it itself is based in difference and distance, beginning with the essential difference between the signifier (the sound or appearance of the word) and the mental signified (the meaning or concept of the word). Signifier and signified are not the same; the word “s-n-o-w” is not snow itself but a representation or signifier of the white frozen crystals we call snow. The signifier represents the signified, it is not identical to it, and in the process of representation lies the possibility for veiling and distortion. Language is constructed on the basis of difference, or the relationship of signifier to signified and of words to each other, not on the basis of a direct correspondence to reality. Hence reality, or what metaphysics called “presence” is never directly available to us. Reality is always shrouded by language, and the workings of language are in turn veiled by the operation of cultural codes.
* De Saussure, Ferdinand, Cours de Linguistique Générale, Paris, Payot, 1979
(American apologist, philosopher and theologian, 1912-1984)
The absolute Truth of God versus the personal truth of secular humanism
For Francis Schaeffer the battle between Christianity and secular humanism — absolute Truth versus personal truth — is one that cannot be ignored or mixed. Sadly, absolute Truth is being drowned out by the myriad chorus of personal truths shaped in the over-arching context of secular humanism and its materialistic end. In the end it is the Truth of God versus the lies offered by secular humanism that mankind is self-sufficient.
Many Christians believe in the truth of creation, the truth of the virgin birth, the truth of Christ's miracles, etc. But they stop there with these and other individual truths. When Schaeffer says Christianity is true he means it is totally true. Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth — Truth about all of reality.
Christianity has the answer to the very thing modern man has despaired of ever finding: a unified answer for the whole of life. This demands that man abandons his rationalistic autonomy and returns to the (reformation) view of the Holy Scriptures, for in so doing he gets back his rationality and his meaningfulness. Schaeffer claims that the Bible speaks truth “both about God Himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the cosmos.” The Bible is the only foundation of the truth. Authentic Christianity constitutes no existential leap into an irrational upper sphere.
Thinking independently of God’s revelation, rationalistic man is unable to find any ‘universals’ (grace) which would give meaning and unity to all the particulars (nature). Modern Philosophies have abandoned their age-old hope of finding a unified answer for knowledge and life. Their relativism has shaped thinking, culture, and theology. The irony of modern man is that his reason has been engulfed by his rationalism. Man’s self-confidence in his power to independent reason has ended, not in the triumph of rationality, but in its actual abandonment. By clinging to his autonomy, man has lost his rationality.
Sowing the seeds for future despair is placed by Schaeffer at the door of Thomas Aquinas through whom the belief in the autonomy of man’s mind gained the predominance. On the basis of this autonomous principle, it came to be believed that natural theology and philosophy could be separated from revelation, and still arrive independently at truth. In fact the Bible is the only foundation of the truth.
Kierkegaard is another of Schaeffer’s foe whom he denounces as the symbol of “the real modern man” who has abandoned the hope of a unified field of knowledge. With Kierkegaard, the modern predicament has degenerated into a dichotomy between ‘faith’ and ‘rationality’, separated by a vast chasm that no amount of rational thinking can bridge. Meaning and truth are thus disconnected from reason and knowledge; if we are to attain them, we have no alternative but to make an irrational “leap of faith”.
Both fideism and irrationalism accept a line of despair. Rationalistic and irrationalistic presuppositions accept the dichotomy of faith and reason. In truth, asserts Schaeffer, modern man longs for a different answer than the answer of his damnation. Christianity, with its reasonable and consistent framework for understanding the world we live in, can put an end to this despair by putting man right with God.
*Francis Schaeffer, Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, Wheaton: Crossway Publishers, 1990
(German philosopher, 1874-1928)
1. The heart of Scheler's thought is his theory of value. According to him, the value-being of an object precedes perception. The axiological reality of values is prior to knowing. "Man, before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, is an ens amans." Scheler is convinced that love serves as the animating principle of all knowing and willing. There exists an order of cognitive emotional intentionality, independent of reason, through which values are apprehended a priori. Rather than reason constituting the conditions of will, as the rationalists claim, Scheler argues that the conditions of reason are constituted by the perception of values.
The foundation of values is neither in reason nor in the will but in feelings and emotions connected to sensations. Reason cannot be the primary ground of normative choice and action; reason follows the "knowing" of the heart.
"The heart has its reasons that reason does not know": Pascal's well known saying sums up Max Scheler's thought on values, present in such feelings as love and sympathy, for it is in the experience of these emotions that we participate in the ideals and truths of our being. Feelings are personal and mysterious but this does not downgrade and reduce them to an incommunicable subjectivity leading to relativism. The heart is different than reason, but it has its own reason and logic.
It is through the experience of feelings that one has access to values, the authenticity of these experiences and the criteria by which to judge them are the conditions and signs of truth. Values are revealed by emotions : they are "phenomenological facts" inaccessible to the intellect - they can only be felt, just as colour can only be seen. Scheler's phenomenology leads to a radically intuitionist understanding of values.
2. According to Scheler, feelings and emotions are a sufficient basis to justify a moral attitude or even to justify the truth of a moral judgment. Critics - such as Karol Wojtyla - have objected that emotions and feelings are not by themselves cognitive attitudes and thus they are not apt to be instrumental in the discernment of the truth. According to Wojtyla, Scheler's emotivism fails to give an balanced account of the essence of the human person which is anchored in an essential reference to the truth, and not in the emotional experience as such. The cognitivist foundation of the human essence is required to ascertain the truth of the human good.
* Scheler, Max ,On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing. Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992
(Belgian-Dutch theologian, b.1914)
No absolutism, no relativism, but perspectivism of Truth
1. Previous centuries were orientated towards the consideration of abstract, universal, unchangeable truths. It was the view of philosophia perennis of the scholastic tradition which claimed that the absolute truth was within reach of human knowledge.
But present-day thought is clearly reacting against the absolutism of past centuries. For phenomenology and existentialism the meaning of reality is related to man, the knower. The world is always a.” worl-for-me”. The notion of truth has moved in the direction of relativism, adopted by modernism.
Schillebeeckx adopts a middle view between absolutism and relativism, scholasticism and modernism. He maintains that the absolute truth is the ontological basis of the various human interpretations that constantly change and grow. The absolute truth is normative, the human possession of that truth is imperfect, evolving, relative. Earlier insights are capable of inexhaustible amplification. This is the “perpectivist” view of knowledge, orientated to and regulated by the absolute truth and according to which man’s insight into truth will never lead to complete unanimity. It stresses the difference between truth and the possession of the truth.
2. The perspectivism that affects every assertion of truth assumes that all knowledge is interpretative. All assertions are only true or false within the context of questioning and understanding. To evaluate properly a certain allegation one must not only pay attention to the answer itself, whether it is true of false, but also take into consideration the questioning in its historical context. The whole historical context of the questioning itself is an integral part of the whole interpretative truth. True answers are less important than right questions. This is not relativism but a recognition that coming to truth is a continuous historical process. Truth itself is absolute but we can only possess it in an historical and perspectivist way.
Therefore truth which is always sought within a constantly changing situation of questions and answers is never found only in our own particular interpretation of reality. It is only when “our” truth is played of against other persons’ truth in dialogue that we are really on the way towards the truth in history. Each person needs the other person’s truth in order to come to the fullness of truth.
3. Schillebeeckx who is a R.C. theologian, is concerned with the application of these perspectivist views on the dogmatic pronouncements of the Church. The question he puts is as follows: are the doctrinal interpretations found in the Church’s history a necessary and irrevocable process, or are they simply a legitimate process, taking into account the historical contingency of the questions? He answers that if our human affirmations of truth are condtioned by the historical situation of the questions and answers with which these affirmations are made , we must admit that our articulations of our knowegde of truth, are legitimate, but not necessary or irrevocable. For the Church or for any other truth-claiming establishment, ‘remaining in the truth’ is a concrete historical reality, not a supra-historical reality. For theologians who persist to regard human knowlegde in rigidly conceptualistic terms and confuse the unchangeable character of truth with a representational view of human concepts, the above view makes unacceptable concession to relativism. In fact, what Schillebeeckx seeks to do is to stress the way in which human – and therefore limited – knowledge can be directed towards the absolute trutth – in other words he emphasizes the sense in which our knowlegde is not relative, in spite of its constituional limitations. The perspectivism he defends must not be equated to relativism.
* Schillebeeckx, Edward, Concept of Truth and Theological Renewal, Sheed & Ward, Lodon, 1968, p.5-9; 22-29; The Language of Faith, Orbis Book, NY, Maryknoll, 1995, p. 58-63
(Danish born British philosopher, 1864-1937)
True and false are the intellectual forms of good and bad
According to Schiller’s brand of pragmatism, called ‘humanism’, the only truth one can speak about is the human truth, conditioned by psychological interests and coming into being by human effort and agency. Knowledge is a manipulation of experience, a shaping of a shapeless reality. Man’s beliefs and desires are essential features of the knowing process. They are the real forces to reckon with in the determination of the formless reality. The making of truth is the making of reality and man himself is the truth-maker in a process that is continuous, progressive and cumulative.
In Schiller’s theory of human truth, purpose is the fundamental concept. Like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ are valuations and, like all valuations, have reference to purpose. A judgment is put forward as a truth-claim when it fulfils the purposes and satisfies the interests of its maker. In so far as an assertion satisfies the purpose of an enquiry to which it owes its being, it is so far ‘true’. True and false are the intellectual forms of good and bad. “Objective” truth is the result of social pressure for common purposes and ends. It is that which satisfies the interests and purposes of the community. “Subjective” truth is the result of satisfaction of individual purposes and ends.
Since truth is relative to purpose, differences of purpose and disparities of interests determine fundamental differences over what is true and false for each individual and community. Thus Schiller affirms the individualistic and plural forms that truth and falsehood might assume. What is true for me may be false for you, if our purposes are different. The determination of truth and falsehood is as various as the purposes and interests that inspire diverse human interests and actions.
* See Thayer H.S., From Meaning and Action, The Bobbs-Merril C_, New York, 1968, p.297-301; History of Philosophy, Vol.2, Ed. by Radhakrishnan, London, Allen & Unwin, 1953, p. 349-352
(German theologian, 1768-1834)
The concept of man’s pious feeling of utter dependence on God, the intuition of his connection with God is the central tenet of Scleiermacher theology, a theology of feeling, the theology of ‘pious feeling’, of ‘pious self-awareness’. Faith in God rests on an a priori specifically religious, not – as Kant would say – on an a priori purely moral. This a priori specifically religious is “the absolute feeling of utter dependence”. In other words this feeling defines the religious man, it is part of being-man as such. It points at the truth that the necessarily religious character of being-human rests on this a priori incontestable and real feeling of utter dependence on God.
Intellectual truth has a position of secondary importance. The tenets of Christianity, for him, are simply only ‘conceptions of states of mind of Christian piety, represented in speech’. The tenets are only derivatives of the inner state. Theology is only the didactic human word – inferior to the poetic word – capable of transformation and relatively non-binding. Dogmatics is nothing more than ‘the representation of the opinion of the Church’. Intellectual truth which is always provisional remains the concern of philosophy. Truth in its ultimate, decisive, but also ineffable sense is reserved for mute feeling which in the best event “sings”, and only as a last resort, and then inadequately, speaks. Theological pronouncements are strictly theological to the extent that they are intended and meant to be received as pronouncements of religious feeling. In entering upon the field of what is objective and thus expressible they become potentially inadequate by having lost their sure footing, the centre which represents the peaceful, inexpressible truth.
Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the subjective emotional side of religion does not imply in the least that he was an advocate of ‘natural’ religion, a religion in itself. For him, religion, the original state of being pious, is real only in a definite, concrete and temporal way. There is no original divine revelation without the temporal exponent of historical revelation. Religion is real only as positive religion. The impulse proceeding from Christ imparts to Christianity the possibility of existence. It is the Christ of history that makes the Christian religion real. Revelation, which is Christ for Schleiermacher, is the realizing element in religion, the archetypal image, the original source, the objective pole of the Christian religion. But this has nothing to do with true and false. Truth in religion – which Schleiermacher narrowly identifies with Christianity only - is none other than the feeling of utter dependence.
* See Barth, Karl, Protestant Thought, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1969, chap.8 on Schleiermacher
(German logical empiricist philosopher, Vienna circle, 1882-1936)
Schlick belongs to the Vienna school of logical positivism, according to which there are only two sources of knowledge: logical reasoning and empirical experience.
The originality of Schlick is that alone among the logical positivists he held ‘the doctrine of cognitive givenness’, a foundationalist version of the justification of basic beliefs. The central thesis of ‘the doctrine of the given’ is that basic empirical beliefs are justified, not by appeal to further beliefs but rather by appeal to states of “immediate experience” or “direct apprehension” or “intuition” : states which allegedly can confer justification without themselves requiring justification. A basic belief is justified by appeal to an immediate experience of a fact or state of affairs that is given. The justificatory appeal is a direct reference to the objective world, thus avoiding any reference to further beliefs. Schlick endorses the foundationalist position for which the criterion of empirical truth involves agreement with facts of immediate observation. He claims to have found a “criterion of absolute unquestionable truth” in what he calls “exceptional basic statements”, “observations statements” or “constatations”. These basic statements are formulated in demonstrative terms: “here now pain”, “here red house”. Of course such statements are fleeting but they are supposed to be certain and “absolutely valid” at the moment they occur. It is meaningless to ask whether we might be deceived regarding their truth as in the case of tautology. We are immediately confronted with the reality which it describes. The immediate experience provides both meaning and truth.
So Schlick came to defend an empiricist and externalist foundationalism: there are objective facts, external to the knower, accessible to him and capable of justifying his beliefs in a way that is sufficient for knowledge. But other logical positivists rejected his views as close to “empty metaphysics”. For them no position ‘external’ to language is achievable and direct reference to an external reality is a myth.
* Schlick, Moritz, General Theory of Knowledge, Open Court, 1985
(Contemporary American psychologist)
Truth and illusion in spiritual philosophy
In spiritual philosophy we separate reality into truth and illusion, equating these terms with the real and the unreal. While these are valid distinctions in themselves, they cannot be applied to describe the manifest world. They are only valid as descriptions of our perceptions. Perceptions, however, can be either superficial or deeply insightful. Truth is a perception of depth in which we perceive more of what is there, while illusion is a superficial perception of reality.
From this description it is quite obvious that a lot of what passes as truth in the public arena - clearly evident in political statements - and between people, is illusion.
At the superficial level of reality we experience separateness and disconnection. At deeper levels we experience unity. It is through deepening our perceptions that we begin to experience the deeper levels of who we are and of what things are, and there we find connections. This is why people make meaningful connections with one another when they reveal their depths to each other.
Truth is what is real at a deeper level than the form or appearance level of anything. This is why in Eastern philosophies the form world is called the world of illusion. The form is but the outer expression of truth. To put it philosophically, truth is therefore the essence of something or the existence of something, rather than the appearance of something. The essence and existence of anything or anyone are unique in the sense that they each contain both the universal dimension and the individual dimension. It is the universal dimension that links all life and all beings together. Truth is therefore always unifying in its effects. And when we speak the truth we are integrating our inner (soul) and outer (personality) selves.
When we perceive or experience either the essence or the existence of something, we do so with both personality awareness and soul consciousness. The personality awareness enables us to see the individual nature, and the soul consciousness enables us to perceive and experience the universal nature. Truth is not the same as facts. So in our pursuit of truth, we are not talking about 'telling the truth' as opposed to 'telling a lie.' We are talking about living truth versus living illusion. What we call 'telling the truth' and 'telling a lie' are both often different versions of illusion and ways of remaining in control of a situation. We adjust to the version that enables us to be in control, have the upper hand, get what we want, or be 'right.'
Illusion is an incomplete perception of truth. When we do not perceive with soul consciousness we do not know the universal dimensions of what we are seeing or experiencing. We are then able to perceive or experience only the form or appearance of something. This partial perception, which is personality perception only, is described as illusion. It is seeing the part, the particular, the individual or the appearance, and relating to it as if it had no other dimensions to its existence. Illusion is rigid, fixed and somewhat static. It is limited and held in place by its form. Truth on the other hand is very flexible as it can express itself in endless ways and still be itself.
*Schneider Andrew in an article was first published by Trans4mind in a past edition of Cultivate Life! Magazine
(German philosopher, 1788-1860)
The truth of man and the universe is not in consciousness but in Will
"My philosophy, writes Schopenhauer, is the first which has come to place the essence of man, not in consciousness, but in the will”. Human nature is governed by will not reason. He finds the truth of things in a will which is indeed unaffected by conscious motives. He has discredited the doctrinaire belief that ideas have original force of their own.
His original contribution to philosophy is the assertion that will is more fundamental than thought in both man and nature. For him the world, according to the language of reason, history and morality, is not the true world, for its sole essence, the very substance of the world, of life itself, is the Will that roars underneath. This Will is the ubiquitous instinct of the universe, consisting of forces, impulses and dark urges that are all dynamic yet purposeless, thus dispatching modes of explanation such as reason or logic to secondary status.
The keynote of his philosophy is that the sole essential reality in the universe is the will, and that all visible and tangible phenomena are merely subjective representations of that 'will which is the only thing-in-itself' that actually exists.
For him the "real" was not, as for Hegel, the rational but the irrational. The Will is "an unconscious, blind and irresistible impulse". The common-sense belief in free will is an illusion. Human beings may kid themselves into thinking they are acting on the basis of reason alone but this is never in fact the case. The intellect merely assists the will to achieve its ends. He argued that to be a thinker is as illusory as being a sick man or a misfortunate man, and that he was profoundly something else and that something else is WILL: the dark root of reality.
There is a source of knowledge within us by which we know, and more intimate than we can ever know anything external, that we will and feel. That is the first and the highest knowledge, the only knowledge that can strictly be called immediate; and to ourselves we as the subject of will are truly the "immediate object." It is in this sense of will - of will without motives, but not without consciousness of some sort - that reality is revealed.
It is amidst the event of intense pleasure and pain that Schopenhauer discovers the Will. The event of pleasure and pain awakens the Will—it is discovered as the inner truth of externalised perception, representation. It is through the conduit of intense pleasure and pain that the true inside is disclosed—it is immediate as Will, not subject to the mediation of representation.
*Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Peter Smith Publisher hardcover set 1969
(Swiss philosopher of religion, poet and artist, 1907-1998)
According to Schuon the unity of Truth must be a "Transcendent Unity". The fact that it is transcendent, means that it can be univocally described by none. Thus, while there is one and only one Truth, there are many expressions of it. He applies this principle to the consideration of the religious phenomenon. All religions are equal guardians of "primeval truth," all of them pointing to the one Absolute beyond their competing absolute claims. This is the so-called "perennialism" of Frithjof Schuon and several other thinkers, also called the "Philosophia Perennis". According to the perennialist, each historical religion seems to be exclusive and irreducible in its unique content, but in fact, all religions are so many diverse mediators or symbolic languages straddling the abyss between man and the Absolute, and may thus be "ranked," as it were, according to the more or less perfect metaphysical insight they contain in a veiled form.
Frithjof Schuon persuasively argues for what he terms the "transcendent unity of religions" which he claims is the foundation of and lies at the very heart of every religious tradition. He holds that the religions of the world originate from the same ultimate source. "The Divine Will," he writes, "has distributed the one Truth under different forms or, to express it in another way, between different humanities or cultures".
He claims that the unity and essential meanings that form the commonality of religions cannot be found on the surface or exoteric levels but begin at the esoteric and become only evident at the transcendent levels. According to him, the unity of the different religions is not only unrealizable on the external level, that of the forms themselves, but ought not to be realized at that level even were this possible, for in that case the revealed forms would be deprived of their sufficient reason. The very fact that they are revealed, he claims, "shows that they are willed by the Divine Word." The unity of the religious forms must be realized in a purely inward and spiritual way and without prejudice to any particular form. According to him the antagonisms between these forms does not affect the one universal Truth.
The distinction between the exoteric or outer and the esoteric or inner dimensions of religion is essential to understand the diversity and unity of all religions. Outwardly the doctrines of the world's religions are clearly different, even contradictory, as can be seen in their theologies. The Hindu tradition, for example, includes many Gods, Judaism insists there is only one God, Buddhism declares the question of God to be irrelevant, Christianity believes that God is a Trinity, etc. The exoteric believers are religious people for whom the externals of religion count most - beliefs, rituals, practices. To be religious, for exoteric believers, is primarily a matter of professing creeds, or performing rituals, or observing laws. These creeds are taken literally and the rituals or laws are taken absolutely: you have to do it exactly this way. Moreover, exoteric believers tend to view their own religion as the only, or at least the best, way of being religious and following God's will.
* Schuon, Frithjuof, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, The Theosophical Publishing House, 1993
(French doctor, philosopher and theologian, 1873-1965)
Living truth is only that which has its origin in individual thought
It is only when we gain confidence that we can find the truth through our own individual thought that we will be able to arrive at living truth. Independent thought, provided it is profound, never degenerates into subjectivity. What is true in our tradition will be brought to light through deep thought, and it can become the force of reason in us. The will to sincerity must be as strong as the will to truth. Only an age that has the courage of conviction can possess truth that works as a force of spirit and of reason. Truth based on a skepticism that has become belief has not the spiritual qualities of truth that originated in thought. It exerts an influence over man, but it cannot reach his inner being. Living truth is only that which has its origin in thought. The fundamental truths of Christianity must be confirmed by thought and personal reflection. What one believes must not be proved, but credible and appeal to intelligence and understanding.
The enemy of Christianity is not atheism or critical rationalism but the refusal of a thought that Christianity needs. Schweitzer wrote: “It is in believing in thought that I am able to remain faithful to Christianity”. One has access to the Gospel through the working of thought.
Truth is always more precious than error. This applies also to historical truth. Whereas it may look strange to piety and can raise difficulties, the final result is never disappointing. It can only strengthen piety. Religion has nothing to fear from a confrontation to historical truth. Christian truth today would have more power in today’s world if its relation to historical truth had in all points of view been what it should be. Each time historical truth came to embarrass Christianity, it has interpreted it in its own way or consciously falsified, even denied it. Today the situation of Christianity is such that we have to struggle to adopt an attitude of free thinking in regard to historical truth, so neglected in the past. The truth is not Jesus as historically known but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, not the "historical Jesus" but the Spirit that goes forth from him. A new Renaissance must come, and a much greater one than that in which we stepped out of the Middle Ages; a great Renaissance in which mankind discovers that the ethical is the highest truth and the highest practicality.
Since we only accept knowledge that is based on truth attained through logical reasoning, the convictions on which mysticism is founded cannot become our own. Moreover, they are not satisfying in themselves. Of all the mysticism of the past it must be said that its ethical content is slight. It puts men on the road of inwardness, but not on that of a viable ethic. The truth of philosophy is not proved until it has led us to experience the relationship between our being and that of the universe, an experience that makes us genuine human beings, guided by an active ethic.
* Schweitzer, Albert Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography. 1933, George Allen & Unwin
(Scottish medieval theologian and philosopher, 1266-1308)
Several theological truths cannot be established by natural reason
The relation of philosophy and theology, for Scotus, was based on the nature of their respective sources: reason and revelation. Scotus's formulation of this problem followed the pattern established by St. Thomas Aquinas. He shared with St. Thomas Aquinas the belief that truth was one and that theology and philosophy do not contradict each other but represent two different approaches to the same truth. However, according to Scotus, many metaphysical and theological truths which are for St. Thomas demonstrable by reason are not so for him . Reason needs the assistance of faith in many of the conclusions which for St. Thomas are simply rational truths. Concerning the immortality of the soul, for instance, the argument of St. Thomas and of the entire Scholastic tradition was that the immaterial nature and hence the spirituality and immortality of the soul are deduced from the fact that the object of the intellect is the immaterial essences of things. For Scotus – who gives priority to the will over the intellect - this argument has the value only of possibility, of non-repugnance. Since the will of God is not bound to any contingent thing, and is free to do anything that does not imply contradiction, Scotus concludes that the alternative is also possible; namely, that the soul can perish with the body. Hence Scotus affirms that it is faith only that gives us the assurance that the immortality of the soul has real foundation.
Thus Scotus increased the list of revealed truths a Christian should believe but cannot prove. As the "credibles" increased and the demonstrables decreased, the marriage of faith and reason in the thirteenth century (Aquinas), was weakened in the fourteenth century (Scotus and Ockham).
* See Vos., A. The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
(American philosopher of language and mind, b.1932)
1. Searle upholds what he calls “external” or “metaphysical realism”, the view that there is a world ‘out there’ that is totally independent of our mental and linguistic representations of the world in the form of beliefs, experiences and theories. External realism does not deny that there are large areas of reality that are social constructs, created by human behaviour (money, property, marriage…) but it maintains that there are also large sections of the world described by our representations that are completely independent of these representations.
For Searle realism is not a hypothesis, belief or philosophical thesis. It is the precondition of having hypotheses, the condition of possibility of there being public discourse at all. A public language presupposes a public world. Therefore we must say that there is nothing epistemic about external realism which is precisely the claim that reality is radically non-epistemic. This means that Searle’s argument for realism is completely independent of questions of knowledge or even truth. He does not say “that in order to know the truth of our claims we have to presuppose realism”. The claim is about conditions of intelligibility, not about conditions of knowledge and truth.
Moreover metaphysical or external realism is perfectly consistent with conceptual relativism. Indeed our conception of reality is relative to our constitution. It is a trivial to say that we only form concepts that we are able to form. Thus Searle defends both that reality exists independently of our representations of it and that all representations of reality are made relative to some arbitrary selected sets of concepts. External realism is for Searle “the thesis that there is a way that things are that is independent of all representations of how things are” and that our ordinary linguistic practices presuppose external realism.
One should not infer from this that external realism is identical with the correspondence theory of truth. Realism is not a theory of truth and does imply any theory of truth. In fact realism is consistent with any theory of truth because it is a theory of ontology and not of the meaning of “true”.
2. But then what is “truth” for Searle?
The function of language is twofold: either to communicate meanings from speakers to hearers or to enable these meanings to refer to object and state of affairs in the world that exist independently of language. Language is both communicative and referential. Searle rejects Wittgenstein’s view that language is only communicative and not referential. Through language people always refer to a reality beyond language. One cannot get away from the idea that representation is somehow the essence of language.
Searle offers a minimal version of the correspondence theory of truth. He explains that we need words for assessing success and failure in our endeavour to a satisfactory representation of the world by our words. Truth is a sort of satisfaction of representations of how things are in the world. Thus Searle’s basic conception of truth is that it is a matter of accurate representation of an independently existing reality. Moreover assertive speech acts commit the speaker to the truth of the proposition. The commitment to truth is internal to statement making. A statement is simply a commitment to the truth expressed in the proposition. There is no gap at all between making a statement and committing oneself to its truth. To make a statement is eo ipso a commitment to truth. In some cases one can perform a speech act without its normal commitment. That is what happens in works of fiction. We all understand them as derivative forms of the fundamental ones of assertive speech acts. In every genuine assertion, the assuming of responsibility must be present in making an assertion. We take responsibility for truth, sincerity, and evidence. Like the speech-act of promising is a commitment to future action, the speech act of assertion is a commitment to truth.
* See Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers, Oxford University Press, 1987, Dialogue with Searle on Wittgenstein
(Contemporary American philosopher)
Seifert turns to insights developed mostly by Augustine to refute any form of skepticism and show how the evidence of objective truth discloses itself even to the mind who doubts. His thesis is that the human mind, even when it finds threatened by the most skeptical doubt, can reach a certainty immune to any possible skeptical objection because it reaches that which is both evident in itself and which is presupposed by any skeptical doubt.
First there is the indubitable knowledge of the immediate experience of myself as knowing existing subject. Even if I doubt of everything, I still discover with absolute certainty that I am a conscious being as subject. Through the ‘subjective’ knowledge that I exist, I touch in my own being one objective and real existence, one that is far more important and real than the whole material universe.
In this indubitable knowledge of myself as subject, I grasp also that I doubt, that I do not know many things etc. In the truth that I am, I grasp the truth that I think, doubt, lack certainty. As Augustine wrote: “Every one who knows that he is in doubt about something knows a truth. Every one who doubts if there be a truth, has in himself a true thing of which he does not doubt. Consequently whoever for whatever reason can doubt, ought not to doubt that there is truth.” When we doubt we understand that we doubt. Doubt presupposes not only the intentional object of doubt but also the self-awareness which permits the understanding that one doubts.
From the indubitable factual truth about my own existence follow infinitely many other factual truths about my knowledge. For instance if I say “I do not want to err”, it will be true that whether I err or do not err, yet I do not want to err. Or if I say “ I know that I live” I can also say this other truth that “ I know that I know that I live” etc. Moreover the cognition of universal necessary truths is contained in the attitude of doubt. In order to be meaningful at all, doubt presupposes the absolute validity of the principle of contradiction. I grasp that either there is truth or there is no truth, but both cannot occur. If A and not-A could be possible together, then doubt would make no more sense. The most radical skeptic sees that a thing cannot be and not be in the same sense at the same time.
Another essentially necessary fact which is presupposed for any act of doubt is the will to be certain and to avoid error. Any genuine doubt presupposes the desire for knowledge. This implies again a whole world of related facts. In seeking to know, the one who doubts also understands what knowledge is. Thus the nature of truth is discovered in doubt, as a unique sort of conformity between judgements and the state of affair posited in them. With truth which I wish to attain, I also know the essence of error which I wish to avoid.
Thus knowledge, conviction, judgement, truth, error, certainty – all these are given in the act of doubt. I also perceive that some axiological knowledge is gained in doubt. The value of knowledge and truth when compared to falsity and error, the superior value of knowledge when compared to doubt, etc. are known in doubt. Knowledge and the desire of truth are goods for the person who possesses them. If he seriously doubts, he understands that his doubt differs from a cynical rejection of truth.
Finally everyone who doubts judges that he ought not to assent rashly. He knows he ought to abstain from judging if he possesses insufficient knowledge to warrant the judging assent. He is aware that doubt for him is preferable to blind assent.
* Seifert, Joseph, From Relatiivism and Skepticism to Truth and Certainty, Truth Journal article, 2002
(American philosopher, 1912-1989)
The myth of the empirical truth
Sellars is opposed to the idea that there is a priviliged stratum of fact, facts that are taken as 'given', on which our empirical knowledge of the world is founded, and to which all meaning and truth can be reduced. He develops his ideas in a book entitled The Myth of the Given. Such 'givens', whether they are thought of as sense data or material objects, first principles, universals or propositions, are often supposed to act as the 'unmoved movers' of empirical knowledge. He holds the radical view that all attempts to reduce knowledge to a privileged stratum of natural fact are doomed to fail. The backbone of his argument is his claim that knowledge is radically linguistic, while the alleged 'givens' are supposed to be not. According to him, knowledge is not a matter of being in a certain empirical state, such as being affected by an object in certain ways, or being in a certain brain state. Rather, it is being in a logical state, a matter of relating to one's linguistic peers, of logically justifying one's assertions in the face of the language community. For instance, if we believe that apples are red, this fact cannot be analyzed into intrinsic facts about apples, nor into sensory impressions, behavioral dispositions, or intrinsic features of the brain. Our beliefs count as knowledge just because our linguistic peers are typically prepared to accept our claim that apples are red. Knowledge is located in the 'logical space' of language; any attempt to analyze it as a natural process falls prey to what Sellars calls 'the naturalistic fallacy'. For Sellars as well as for all those who have accepted the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, knowledge is not a transaction between 'the knowing subject' and 'reality' for the discovery of the truth. It is not something real, but something located in the self-contained sphere of discourse. All efforts to break out of discourse to some sort of 'given' beyond discourse are fruitless. The linguistic turn adopted by Sellars - and others - suggests that knowledge as such is not real. Knowledge becomes a thing alien and sublime, something not-of-this-world, as opposed to the world grasped by it. The world can no longer be claimed to determine either the meaning, truth or validity of our empirical statements. The self is thereby exiled from the world known by it. This is a serious problem for any aspiring cognitive science. The professed aim of cognitive science is to study knowledge as an empirical phenomenon. If Sellars' criticism of the Myth of the Given is correct, no empirical account of knowledge can succeed, because knowledge is not an empirical reality.
* Sellars Wilfred, Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Harvard University Press, 1997
(Greek philosopher, 3d century A.D.)
People who think are usually led on to enquire what is true in things and what is false, hoping by the settlement of this question to attain quietude and peace of mind. The main basic principle of Sextus Empiricus’s sceptical system is that peace of mind can be obtained only in ceasing to dogmatize about the true and the false. It is impossible to decide the controversy about what is true and what is false. For every proposition has a co-equal opposing proposition and thus every proposition is susceptible to doubt.
Moreover the man who says that something true exists will not be believed without proof. If he wishes to offer proof, he has to show that his proof is true. He will be involved in circular reasoning; he will be required to show proof of the real truth of his proof, and so on ad infinitum. The criterion of truth is therefore unattainable. It is not possible to make positive assertions about what seems evident no more than about what is not evident.
Sextus Empiricus says that there are three approaches to the study of knowledge and truth. The “Dogmatists” assert that truth is discoverable and that they have found it, for instance Aristotle and the Stoics. The “Academics” assert that truth is not discoverable, for instance Carneades. The “Sceptics” suspend judgement and continue to search for conditions under which truth can be discovered.
The scepticism of Sextus Empiricus attempts to avoid error by suspending judgement about questions which cannot be resolved with certainty. However suspension of judgement for him is not posited in any absolute sense as a formula for truth. Scepticism is more a method of avoiding error than of affirming a form of truth. The sceptic avoids believing or disbelieving anything because modes of belief and unbelief are seen as creating conflict and as not leading peace of mind about what constitutes truth or falsehood.
The sceptic, says Sextus, has no doubt concerning the appearances themselves but he has doubt regarding the account given of appearances, which is a different thing from questioning the appearances themselves. He does not argue about the appearances but about the judgement regarding the appearances. No one disputes that the underlying object has this or that appearance, the point in dispute is whether the object is in reality such as it appears to be. In adhering to appearances the wise person lives in accordance with the normal rules of life, undogmatically, seeing that he cannot remain inactive.
The sceptic’s end is “quietude” in respect of matters of opinion and “moderate feelings” in respect of things unavoidable. Sextus Empiricus does not suppose that the sceptic is wholly untroubled. He says that the sceptic is troubled by things unavoidable – getting old, feeling thirsty, etc. – like any one else. But unlike ordinary people he rejects the belief that these conditions are evil by nature, and thus he can bear them with less discomfort. In regard to matters of opinion the sceptic’s end is “quietude”, and in regard to things unavoidable it is “moderate affection”.
* Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Cambridge, Massachusstes, 1933, translated by R.G. Bury
(Indian philosopher and theologian, 788-820)
Truth is eternal and changeless, still the world of time and change is neither true nor false
S’ankara’s definition of Truth will help to grasp why for him the world is not considered true. He says that whatever thing remains eternal is true, and whatever is non-eternal is untrue. Since the world is created and destroyed, it is not true. What is Truth is necessarily unchanging. Since the world is changing, it is not true. Whatever is independent of space and time is true, and whatever has space and time in itself is untrue.
However, S’ankara claims that the world is not absolutely false. It appears false only when compared to Brahman. In the pragmatic state, the world is completely true—which occurs as long as we are under the influence of ‘Maya’ or delusion. As the world cannot be both true and false at the same time, S’ankara classified the world as indescribable, as neither true nor false: “Sad-asad-anirvacanya” . The following points suggest that according to Adi Shankara, the world is not false. He believes in Karma, or good actions. This is a feature of this world. So the world cannot be false. The Supreme Reality Brahman is the basis of this world. The world is like its reflection. Hence the world cannot be totally false. False is something which is ascribed to nonexistent things, such as a round square. But the world is a something which is perceived by our senses and thus real in the pragmatic sense. According to Sankara’s theory of error, the false appearance is a positive, presented entity that is characterized neither
as existent (because it is sublated when the illusion is corrected) nor as non-existent (because it is presented, given as
much as the real is). S’ankara thus introduced a new category of the ‘false’ apart from the usual categories of the existent and
the nonexistent. The world and finite individuals are ‘false’ only in this sense: their reality is
not logically deducible from Brahman, and their experience is cancelled with the knowledge of Brahman. The world and
the finite selves are not creations or emanations of Brahman. They are appearances that are superimposed on Brahman because of
man’s ignorance.
Even S’ankara’s concept of Maya is neither true nor untrue. Since Brahman is the only truth, Maya cannot be true. Since Maya causes the material world to be seen, it cannot be untrue. Hence, Maya is also characterised as indescribable.
Sankara tries to reconcile his understanding of the objective world of individuated things perceived by individual beings with the final reality of non-dualistic Vedânta by virtue of a two-level theory of truth. For the unenlightened the plural world seems to be the ultimate reality. But those who practice jnana yoga and attain a “cognition of the infinite” transcend this lower level to attain to pure consciousness (moksha).
*See Mercier J.L. From the Upanishads to Aurobindo, Asian Trading Corporation, Bangalore, India, 2002
(Contemporary American sociologist)
Traditionally the distinction is made between truth by nature and truth by convention. Truth by convention differs from place to place, whereas the truth by nature is universal. The sociologist Shapin expresses his disagreement with this distinction. He declares all truths to be mere conventions and denies that any truth claim can ever be admitted to be a truth by nature. He claims that what counts as the truth is social and the social is not reducible to the individual. Science is social; therefore scientific truth is social; and so the truth is socially relative.
Shapin adopts the point of view of what he calls a `liberal' notion of truth, a notion that equates truth and consensual belief. He calls the notion `liberal' because it allows that what is true will vary between times and between communities, since consensual belief so varies. He contrasts this relativism with what he calls the `restrictive' notion of truth, which distinguishes between truth and belief, and maintains that what is true does not vary over time or space. The restrictive notion is naturally associated with the realist correspondence theories of truth, which make what is true depend on the state of a mind-independent reality,
Shapin does not argue against realism, but maintains that his relativism matters methodologically: realism, for him, creates a bias in favour of our own stock of knowledge, blocking curiosity about cultural variation. He is a social constructivist and a relativist, at least as a matter of method. He feels that relativism disposes us towards a charitable reading of alien belief. He acknowledges that, as ordinary actors, we are all realists, but he advocates relativism as an important resource for the special project of interpreting cultural variations.
Shapin draws the following conclusion: 'As we come to recognise the conventional and artificial status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realise that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know.' For him, then, reality constrains knowledge in no way at all. The only limits are 'ourselves'. Science is the 'artificial' result of social rules and conventions. Shapin accepts the existence of an external reality but seems to regard it useless in shaping scientific knowledge. "Social truth" is a relevant concept but it has nothing to do with reality which might as well not exist.
No wonder then that Shapin rejects all individualistic epistemologies to turn his attention to the 'epistemology of testimony'. Given the extent to which science depends upon testimony, the crucial question about truth for him becomes: which testimony should one accept?
* Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth, University of Chicago Press, 1994
(Russian born existentialist philosopher, 1866-1938)
Shestov, much like Kierkegaard, rebelled against all impersonalistic philosophies. He could not tolerate their allegedly “uncreated truths” or “necessities”. Over against them he set “the created truths” of the sovereign personal God of the Bible, the God to whom all things are possible. Absolute truth is rooted and grounded in the Person of God, the Creator. God can and must be placed above the truths. Shestov rejects the “dogma” of the sovereignty of reason and the autonomy of truth. The tree of philosophical knowledge must not choke the tree of life. Scriptural faith is the locus where truth abandons itself joyously at the disposition of the Creator: “Thy will be done!” Only the Faith that looks at the Creator radiates from itself the supreme and decisive truths concerning what is and what is not.
Shestov proposes a religious philosophy which would be “a turning away from knowledge and a surmounting by truth”. Human wisdom is foolishness before God. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin. A philosophy that does not dare to rise above autonomous knowledge does not lead man toward truth but for ever turns him away from it.
God is limitless potentialities: he is not bound by any sort of necessary truths. He stands opposite the kingdom of necessity, the kingdom of reason. Nothing can limit him. Truth is subordinated to God. Shestov agrees with the voluntarism found in Duns Scotus. He posits the problem even more radically. If God exists, there lays disclosed all possibility, and the truths of reason cease to be incontrovertible.
Truth like everything that exists has been created by God; it is always in his power. In that precisely lies its high value and superiority in relation to the uncreated truths of the Greeks. The pious thinkers of the Middle Ages, in their defence of man against the arbitrariness of God, attempted to transform the truths received from God, into proven truths, self-evident truths (as the principles of the Greeks demanded of them). The temptation of philosophers has always been to depend on their own knowledge and to impersonal principles rather then on the sovereign Person of the Creator. According to Shestov the ‘original sin’ consists in the fact that man has tasted of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Evil came into the world with knowledge. But the truly Christian thinkers should abide by created truths rather then by the truths of reason. The basic categories of Greek thought must be rejected, as well as all the postulates of natural knowledge and natural morality.
Over and over again Shestov returns to the deadly results of man’s lust for knowledge which would submerge both God and man in its hostile impersonalism. In a world created by God, says Shestov, there are not and cannot be any first principles, that is, principles absolutely independent and sufficient by themselves. Abraham, the hero of faith, simply believed, needing no ‘proof” of reason. Abraham’s God must replace the God of philosophers and theologians.
* Chestov, Lev, Kierkegaard et la Philosophie Existentielle, Vrin, Paris, 1936
(Contemporary American philosopher of education)
Siegel argues that the 'critical thinking' he advocates needs an epistemology that does justice to reason and rationality, an argument that informs his discussions about critical pedagogy. This epistemology needs to distinguish between rational justification and truth and acknowledge rational justification as a fallible indicator of truth. For Siegel, the justification of beliefs should arise because of good reasons, supported by standards that are nonetheless fallible (hence not necessarily true). If this view is correct, then the basic educational aim should be seen not as the production of true belief, per se, but rather as that of enabling students to judge wisely the truth, and this sort of judgment just is judgment based on the proper evaluation of reasons. Students should be enabled not to judge the truth infallibly but to estimate the truth responsibly and that is a matter of rational inquiry and judgment. Consequently, critical thinking, and the pursuit of justified belief, is educationally fundamental, even if one may agree that truth is more fundamental than warrant, justification or rationality in the broader context of social-epistemological theory. The primary epistemic aim of education is not true belief but rather the development of students who judge or estimate the truth skillfully and well, and this is a matter of critical thinking.
To state this point more succinctly: the pre-eminent aim of education cannot be the learning of truths simpliciter, given fallibilism; it must rather be the learning of what we identify at a given time as true. That is, it is our best estimate of truth that is key - and that is what critical thinking is all about. Consequently, even if our fundamental epistemic aim is true belief, our inability to acquire it directly requires that we pursue it by way of critical thinking/evidential reasoning, and it is therefore the latter which is the proper (epistemic) focus of education.
Thus it is a mistake to regard the basic aim of education as the promotion of truth. While we aim at truth, we determine truth value by engaging in inquiry and assessing justificatory status: is there good reason to regard the proposition in question as true? the basic aim of education must be the development in students of the ability to assess truth status skillfully and accurately. It is only through such assessment that students can hope, and be expected, to reach and recognize the truth they seek.
From the educational point of view, it is justification rather than truth which is epistemically fundamental. Note that this is completely compatible with the veritist's point that the value of justification lies in its tie to truth. Nevertheless, it suggests that critical thinking, and justification more generally, has educational and epistemic value independently of its serving as a means to true belief.
Siegel disagrees with those who regard critical thinking or rational inference only as a useful means to the fundamental epistemic end of true belief. According to him critical thinking is not only instrumentally valuable in virtue of its tie to truth; it is also intrinsically valuable in virtue of its multifaceted relationships to rationality, justification and responsible belief. From the educational point of view, it is critical thinking which is fundamental, not truth.
* Siegel, Harvey, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education. New York and London: Routledge (Philosophy of Education Research Library) 1988
(Medieval philosopher, 1240-1284)
The pursuit of truth without the control of religion
Historians of medieval philosophy do not agree whether or not Siger of Brabant held the theory of the double truth, attributed to Averroes, and according to which a single truth is scientifically formulated in philosophy and allegorically expressed in theology. Philosophy is the study of what would have been true by natural necessity (in the absence of divine intervention) and theology deals with what is actually true by virtue of divine intervention. For instance, in the particular debate around the unicity or plurality of human souls, philosophy would state that there is one rational soul but religious knowledge points at the fact that God has miraculously intervened to multiply these souls that nature could not multiply. Siger of Brabant in his unreserved enthusiasm for Aristotelian philosophy and little concern for theological matters seems to have held this view, being thus the promoter of “Latin Averroism”, a designation that underlines his implicit agreement with Averroes’s theory of the double truth.
For Siger, to philosophize meant to return to the philosophy of Aristotle, mostly interpreted by Averroes. Averroes had rebuked Avicenna for destroying the purity of the Aristotelian philosophy by mixing his Mohammedan religion with it. Siger’s mind was similar to that of Averroes, in that he showed little or no concern for theological matters to safeguard the perfection of the Aristotelian philosophy. But Aristotle’s philosophy contained doctrines contrary to the Christian faith, such as the denial of divine providence and personal immortality. However Siger did not deny the truth of Christian revelation. He simply made it clear that he was pursuing his work as a philosopher, not as a theologian. Thus far from adopting the “double truth” theory, one philosophical and the other theological in contradiction with each other (as is sometimes claimed by historian of Medieval philosophy), Siger asserted the superiority of revealed truth over philosophical reason. In this sense his standpoint was the opposite of Averroes’ own view which exalts reason over (Mohammedan) revelation. What Siger and Averroes have in common is that both affirms the right to philosophize apart from religion and therefore the freedom of human reason to pursue its search for truth without the control of religion. Theologians have no right to draw conclusions in the scientific field and scientists may not pronouce themselves in theological matters. Still there are no contradictions between scientific truth and theological truth but different viewpoints on truth.
See History of Philosophical Systems, Ed. by Vergelius Fern, N.Y., Philosophical Library, 1950, p.202-203
( Indian religion, 1540 - )
Sikhism does not accept as self-evident or demonstrable that the Truth of Religion is beyond the reach of human perception. It rejects the basic postulate of the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: that the truths of religions have been exclusively and finally revealed in a unique and final act and at a single point in Space-Time. From the viewpoint of these religions, it follows that any new religion (such as Sikhism) or even a new interpretation of religion must be authorized by the evidence already contained in this final and unique act; otherwise, it is a priori errant, a heresy. Sikhism, on the contrary, teaches that the Truth of Religion is ab initio embedded in the heart of man and that its ultimate validity is to be discerned in human experience itself, and not in anything extraneous. Nonetheless Sikhism admits that there have been, and shall be, extraordinarily gifted persons in whom the Truth of Religion has assumed unusual vividness and thus their revelations and teachings are of immense help to mankind, such as the ten Sikh Prophets, the Gurus.
See Internet Sikhism
( American philosopher of religion, 1927-2001))
The difficult question of the criteria of truth in religion
It is common for believers to appeal to authority to establish the truth of their faith. They have not worked out the truths incorporated in their faith from personal experience but by adopting the tradition of a religious community, tradition that has come down from the authority of “revelation”. It seems that they have arrived at the truth by simple acceptance. But then there is a dilemma, for truth does not depend on mere say-so, it has to be arrived at critically, by testing what is proposed and using one’s judgment. The acute problem about the criterion of truth in religion is that the appeal to authority seems to imply circularity and closedness. The argument amounts to saying:” I know that there is a God for he is mentioned in the scriptures; and the sriptures are true, because they have inspired by God”.
However this closedness or circularity does not disturb certain theologians (K. Barth, for instance – see Barth) for whom there can be no external criteria of religion because the truth of faith is not grounded in human reason or experience. For other theologians, similarly unshaken by the objection of circularity, religion represents a certain unique realm of experience within which the truth may be discovered. Religion being a distinctive field of human experience, nothing can be said about its truth save by attending to that experience. In both cases the criteria of truth of religion are not external but internal to the realm of religious language which has its own “logic”.
The position of these theologians runs into serious difficulty when it is confronted by a similar position from within another faith. There would seem no way to decide between the claims of two different religions. Nevertheless the “circularity” position surely points at an ineluctable aspect of the religious phenomenon and it is that there is an irreducable part in religion that is taken on authority. The “given” aspect of revelation always remains , similar to the brute facts encountererd in ordinary experience. But then there may be still criteria to determine the truth of the content of revelation. It is here that the search for external criteria may be relevant and fuitful. There is a variety of reasons which might be appealed to in the justification of a religious revelation.
Ninian Smart lists a few of these reasons, both negative and positive. On the negative side “historical” faiths such as Christianity and Judaism need to be roughly right about the crucial historical facts. Another necessary condition of acceptability of revelation is that there should not be radical conflicts between faith and moral conscience and no inconsistency between different elements of a faith. On the side of positive criteria, appeals to religious experience – such as conversion, insight, vision -, though not susceptible of being considered proofs , are relevant to the truth and worth of a faith. Among other positive criteria, Smart mentions the appeal to the charismatic authority of the founders, the appeal of ethical fruits and the appeal of psychological relevance of a particular religious faith. However he admits that these negative and positive reasons do not provide any knock-down arguments in favour of religious truth.
The exploration of questions of truth between different religions must have recourse to the process of dialogue. The assumption is that religions present something of universal acceptance. Truth indeed is in an important sense universal. It is senseless to hold that what is true for one religion is false for another. Of course, the thesis that all religions claim to point to the truth does not entail that their specific traditional customs need be shared with others. Universalist and missionary faiths – which recognise the universality of truth - such as Buddhism, Islam and Christianity have an advantage here over ethnic and cultural religions that look upon themselves as the customary expression of life in a particular community. If truth is universal, ethnic and cultural religions cannot have any reasonable truth-claims, as well as any interest in interreligious dialogue for truth.
A larger question of the criteria of truth in religion lies between the religious position in general and agnostic humanism. The humanist is sceptical about the transcendent aspect of religious manifestations. For him religious claims are never verifiable. Where the believer sees manifestations of the religious ultimate, the humanist takes them just for psychological, sociological, and other sorts of phenomena. What is disputed is the correct interpretation of facts. The humanist lays stress on the impact of religion in beguiling people from a non-religious position. But here Smart replies that reasons take their character from the subject-matter; to believe in religion for religious reasons is not irrational. The humanist has a narrow understanding of reasoning: what could count as religious reasons are ruled out in advance because the idea of religious ultimate is denied. The humanist position is not a guarantee of a neutral and unprejudiced approach. But it must be conceded that to understand religions and their truth-claims one cannot simply apply the criteria of truth “externally”. It is not possible to resolve the problem of truth in religion from a merely “external” point of view. Ninian Smart deems it necessary to enter into the religious form of life which claims some truth by sympathetic imagination or even personal commitment.
* Smart, Ninian, The Philosophy of Religion, Sheldom Press, London, 1970, p 99-13
(Scottish moral philosopher and political economist,1723-1790)
The invisible hand of Truth
Smith’s analysis of the role of philosophy in humankind begins with the premise that although we cannot know the design, we do take comfort in the notion that there is a design, an order to our world. While we cannot observe the invisible connecting chain that gives rise to the succession we see, we are comforted when, through our imagination, we can conceive of principles that “seem” to explain the order of the events we observe.
As philosophers who shared a belief in the deity as designer, both Newton and Smith faced the same challenge: How do we see into that windowless workshop of the designer? How do we know the design without access to the blueprints? Nature’s “Truth” lies “behind the scenes.” No philosopher has the privilege, as an opera patron might, of going behind the scenes to observe those “concealed connections”. No philosopher can see what the invisible hand has drawn on those inaccessible blueprints. But while Smith knows he cannot “see” the invisible, he believes he can imagine it. Based on what he can see, the visible effects from the work of that invisible hand, he imagines the connecting principles of the design and represents them.
Smith appreciates that he is not describing Truth, but rather he is offering his best approximation of what he imagines Truth to be. Even the work of Isaac Newton, whom Smith admires as the greatest philosopher of all time, is, in Smith’s opinion, a representation, not a Truth. Smith believes we can only imagine the invisible connecting principles designed by an invisible hand. We cannot know them. He would reject as insolent arrogance the assertion of anyone who claimed to know the design and to act on that knowledge with the self-assurance that he acts on behalf of the deity.
Philosophy can only pretend to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature. The difference between the stories of superstition and the representations of philosophy lies not in the distinction between fiction and truth. Neither represents Truth with a capital T. Both are fiction, both are products of the imagination. The difference lies in how the imagination forms the stories to be told. The stories of superstition are often designed to be fantastic in order to intimidate others into belief. The representations of philosophy are based on rich, systematic observation in search of patterns that may approximate the invisible connecting principles. A philosophical analysis that can represent the observed patterns in a familiar, elegant and simple way is compelling to Smith because it meets his standard of philosophical excellence: It is persuasive to a well-educated, open mind.
*See Buchan, James , The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006
Greek philosopher, 469-399)
Every human being is “pregnant” with the truth
When Socrates set about to teach the Athenian youth, he found himself confronted by the ‘Sophists’ i.e. philosophers who were disillusioned with the contradictory theories of the earlier cosmologists about the constitution of physical nature. Their scepticism had the beneficial outcome of drawing their attention to man himself rather than to the cosmos. For the first time Greek philosophy discovered the subject, the self. Unfortunately the aim of these Sophists was not to know the truth about man but to find ways and means for man to be successful in political life. The Sophists were not truth-seekers but success-seekers. For them “man is the measure of all things”, that is, to each one his truth! What is true and just somewhere for some one, is not necessarily true and just elsewhere for some one else! If truth there is, it is in sense-perception. As the perceptions of different individuals differ in regard to the same object, it follows that truth is a matter of taste of the individual. The Sophists’ principle of subjectivity - that the truth must be my truth - undermines all belief in truth as an objective reality. Every individual has a private truth of his own. Socrates could not accept this, for while admitting that the truth must be ‘truth for me’, it is mine in my capacity as a rational being, which means, since reason is universal, that it is not my private truth, but a universal truth which is shared by and valid for all rational beings. Truth is thus established as being not a mere subjective appearance, but something objective, independent of sensations and the self-will of the individual. To deny the supremacy of reason must inevitably end in scepticism and the denial of the objectivity of truth and morality.
Thus Socrates rejects the relativity of truth, justice, goodness, etc...as well as the utilitarian approach of the Sophists. On the other hand, he is not interested in discovering the speculative truth of metaphysics or cosmology but in the ethical truth that helps human beings to be wiser and more virtuous. “Man, know yourself”, the truth about yourself. But how was that to be achieved?
Socrates was convinced that truth dwells within the heart of every human being. “Truth is within”, it does not pass from the teacher to the pupil. Therefore his method in teaching was not monologue but dialogue or dialectic. He questioned people, pretending to be ignorant. Slowly, gradually the truth within the pupil’s mind would emerge without any brain-washing done by the teacher. Socrates called this the ‘midwifery’ method (his mother was a professional midwife) for the midwife’s role is only to help, not to produce. Every human being is ‘pregnant’ with the truth and the teacher is nothing more than a helpful ‘midwife’.
* See F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol.I, London, Burns Oates, 1955, chap. 14
(Contemporary American and Belgian physicists)
Scientific truth versus pseudo-scientific non-sense
In their book ''Fashionable Nonsense'' (“Impostures intellectuelles”) , two physicists of repute (the Belgian Bricmont and the American Sokal) have two stated aims. First, they wish to present the full dossier of pseudoscientific nonsense masquerading as profundity. Second, they want to make a philosophical case against what they call post-modern relativism: the notion that physical reality is nothing but a social construct and that science, despite its pretensions to truth, is just another ''narration'' that encodes the dominant ideology of the culture that produced it.
They denouce the silly pronouncements about science made by famous (mostly French) intellectuals, such as Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard (see these authors) etc. and the extreme "philosophical relativism" of postmodern philosophers working in the new academic discipline of the so-called “sociology of scientific knowledge” (SSK). According to these sociologists, scientific knowledge, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it. They argue that the truth of a proposition depends on who states it or on the social group(s) to which that person belongs. So, statements are true "for us" or "in our culture" or - to sound more sophisticated, as some sociologists try to be - "in our language game". Thus statements for philosophical relativism are not true in any broader sense.
Bricmont and Sokal admit that this attitude might be valid with respect to some kinds of assertions, such as aesthetic judgements or maybe even ethical ones. But in the view of most scientists, scientific statements are - while rarely absolutely true - supposed to be (partially) true or false in an unconditioned way.
Bricmont and Sokal’s book is a defense of scientific realism against the postmodernist trend characterised by generalised relativism. They reject the SSK’s claim that the value of scientific discourse (or any discourse) is purely social, and that there is no absolute truth. Sokal and Bricmont explain that such a philosophy, which they believe denies the difference between science and pseudoscience, is ultimately dangerous because it undermines the rational, objective view of the world.
• Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Non sense (Impostures Intellectuelles), New-York, Picador, 1998
(Contemporary American philosopher)
The human person is defined as being engaged in truth: he/she is "an agent of truth".
Philosophy is grounded in our knowing, in our knowing of the truth. The human person, including the philosopher, is an "agent" of truth. He is someone who puts truth before us through his words and arguments.
Sometimes, when we read Plato or other philosophers, it seems that they conceive truth as a kind of "abstraction," a separated form. But Aristotle showed us that the forms are also in things. This is the realism Sokolowski deals with. The "person," as the "agent of truth," means that truth only exists in a knowing being actively, personally—"I say it is true"—stating the truth based on what is there to be affirmed. Moreover, it must actually be affirmed as knowing.
The philosopher cannot leave aside or out any thing that is. The notion that somehow revelation must be left out on "philosophical grounds" is itself un-philosophical. But when it is encountered, it must be confronted in a philosophic way. The person is "an agent of truth" and this agency includes all truth. He/She is the one who is at the "edge" of the world and it causes him/her to wonder about the world, about his/her mind that knows, about his/her very desire to know what is.
Truth, Aquinas said, exists in the "mind." But it is in the mind affirming what is there, what is not in its own mind. Something is there besides ourselves, but we can know it and in knowing it, also know our own knowing and its ways. But knowing involves truth. We all must begin here. Ours is a time that needs to know that it can know the truth—and that it can also lie to itself if it doesn't.
Sokolovski repeats again and again: the human person is an "agent of truth." This is what we are. Something "new" is at the "margin of the world." The something new is indeed "me" who, with all who come to be in their time, stands at the world's "edge" affirming of what is that it is, of what is not, that it is not. The world itself cannot do this for itself. It needs an "agent of truth" within it.
To be an agent of truth according to Sokolowski is synonymous with being what Aristotle calls a 'rational animal'. We are told that the pursuit of truth is not simply a choice that some of us happen to take up while others don't, but it is a choice that determines whether we are able to realize ourselves fully as human beings or not. The desire for truth as such, Sokolowski calls it veracity, is something that pertains to our nature. It is very deep in us, more basic than any particular desire or emotion, more elementary than any particular attempt to find things out, and more fundamental than any act of telling the truth to others. We are made human by it, and it is there in us to be developed well or badly. Veracity is not a choice. We could say it is a predisposition that we can either actualize or not. We can be happy as human beings only by cultivating our veracity into truthfulness .
The human person is defined by being engaged in truth, and human action is based on truth. Sokolovski does not intend to prove that human beings are specified in this way, but rather to describe, analytically, what the human engagement in truth means.
*Sokolowski Robert, Phenomenology of the human person, Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian educator and philosopher, 1930-1996)
Conscience is the source of common human knowledge of the truth
According to Simon Soloveychik the truth distributed in the world, as the statement about human dignity, as the affirmation of the line between good and evil, lives in people as conscience. Millions of people for thousands of years sought the truth and reached it, and so, gradually the common knowledge (science), the common message about the truth was defined - con-science. In many languages this word is constructed the same way as in Russian (science) is весть and conscience is со-весть). In German Wissen - is knowledge, and Gewissen - is conscience, He states that conscience is a common, one for all, knowledge about what good is and what evil is for humankind. Not for a man, not for his time, not for a group of men, but for humankind as a whole. As language, conscience is individual in each person and it is common for all. He argues that the truth-conscience enters the man not with genes and not by upbringing: if conscience depended on upbringing then many people would not have known about it at all. It enters the man with a bearer of the common knowledge of good and evil, of the truth - via a common thing: human language. To his opinion, a man obtains the moral law, which is conscience, through his native language. His consciousness, his self-consciousness, and his soul are formed during the apprenticeship of speech; his consciousness and his speech are practically the same thing. In speech and in the language, all major images of good and evil, the concept of the truth as well as a concept of the law is available; these concepts and images are becoming a child's own consciousness similar to language. Studying language, its lively phrases, its proverbs, perceiving the folklore, art and literature of his nation, a child is absorbing a common message of good and evil, - his conscience - and besides, he doesn't notice that, it seems to him that conscience occurred somehow by itself.
According to Soloveychik the child who sinks in a moral atmosphere of language and culture absorbs drops of the ocean of public consciousness. Genius people by their immense life work reach to such heights of the truth, that they are called the ‘conscience of mankind’. Both a two year old child, who feels something similar to a sense of guilt for the first time, and a well-known writer, who is called a guardian of human conscience, drink from the same source of common human knowledge of the truth.
* Soloveychik Simon, Parenting for Every One, see Internet
(French social philosopher, 1847-1922)
No truth in science, only fictions that smother our perception of truth
Sorel contends that science does give a true view of reality. He dismisses science as "a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass, energy and the like – fictions compounded out of observed uniformities…deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and…control parts of it." He regards science more as "an achievement of the creative imagination, not an accurate reproduction of the structure of reality, not a map, still less a picture, of what there is. Outside of this set of formulas, of imaginary entities and mathematical relationships in terms of which the system is constructed, there is ‘natural’ nature – the real thing for him.
For Sorel, Science is not nature which “is not a perfect machine, nor an exquisite organism, nor a rational system." He also maintains that the categories we impose upon the world, "alter what we call reality…they do not establish timeless truths as the positivists maintained". For him the Tree of Knowledge has killed the Tree of Life…human life has been reduced to rules that seem to be based on so called objective truths. Such is the appalling arrogance of science: a vast deceit of the imagination, a view that conspires to "stifle the sense of common humanity and destroy human dignity." Science, he maintained, "is not a ‘mill’ into which you can drop any problem facing you, and which yields solutions," that are automatically true and authentic. Yet, this is precisely how too many people seem to regard it.
For Sorel, the inevitable "consequence of the modern scientific movement and the application of scientific categories and methods to the behaviour of men," is an outburst of interest in irrational forces, religions, social unrest, criminality and deviance - resulting directly from an overzealous and monistic obsession with scientific rationalism.
To want to establish an identity between science and nature is illusory: Science does not know nature.
*Georges Sorel : Les préoccupations métaphysiques des physiciens modernes, Paris, 1907
(Russian born American Sociologist, 1889-1968)
The theory of integral truth: the three-dimentional aspects of the truth of faith, reason and the senses
The philosopher-sociologist Pitirim Sorokin identifies three forms of truth: the truth of the senses, the truth of reason, and the truth of faith, or intuition. Modern science, he points out, relies on a combination of the first two, but disregards the third. However, "real" truth—adequate truth—embraces all three approaches—what he called "integral truth".
According to him, this three-dimensional integral knowledge is nearer to absolute truth than any one-sided approach. "The reality given by the integral three-dimensional truth, with its sources of intuition, reason and the senses, is a nearer approach to the infinite metalogical reality of the coincidentia oppositorum [where opposites complement rather than contradict or negate each other] than the purely sensory, or purely rational, or purely intuitional reality. . . The three-fold integral system of truth gives us not only a more adequate knowledge of the reality, but a more valid and less erroneous experience. . . . Each of these systems of truth separated from the rest becomes less valid or more fallacious, even within the specific field of its own competence."
The organs of the senses, not controlled by reason or intuition, can give us but a chaotic mass of impressions, perceptions, sensations, incapable of supplying any integrated knowledge. They can give at best but a mass of meaningless 'facts', without any coherence, relevance, and comprehension. Deprived of the co-operation of the truth of reason and of intuition, these organs of the senses are very limited instruments of knowledge.
Likewise, mere dialectic speculation—the force of reason and intellect—cannot guarantee any valid knowledge of empirical phenomena. Reason, at best, can give us "an unimpeachable syllogism, or a mathematical deduction, but such a syllogism or deduction will be empirically valid only when its major and minor premises are empirically valid. And this empirical adequacy cannot be derived from and by the truth of reason."
Even intuition—the mother of invention, the source of all knowledge gained through either the senses or reason—uncontrolled by the truth of reason and of the senses can easily go astray, giving us "an intuitive error instead of the intuitive truth".
On its own, any single source of truth "misleads us much more easily when it is isolated from, and unchecked by, the other sources and systems of truth than when it is united into one integral whole with the others." The integral truth is not identical with any of the three forms of truth, but embraces all of them. In this three-dimensional aspect of the truth of faith, reason and the senses, the integral truth is nearer to the absolute truth than any one-sided truth of one of these three forms. The empirico-sensory aspect of reality is given by the truth of the senses; the rational aspect, by the truth of reason; the super-rational aspect by the truth of faith. The threefold integral system of truth gives us not only a more adequate knowledge of the reality, but a more valid and less erroneous experience, even within the specific field of each system of truth.
* Sorokin, Pitirim, The Crisis of our Age, Chatham, NY, Oneworld Publication Ltd, 1992
(Contemporary American historiographist)
Historical ‘truths’ are always partial, incomplete and provisional.
Southgate deals with the great debates about history, the wars between the absolutists and the relativists. The absolutists hold that history can and should tell the truth about the past “as it was”, in a fixed way independent of the historian. The relativists believe that history can have many approaches that can be re-examined as they evolve in the cultural context of human situations
For modernism the prestige of science was such that historians were expected to eliminate all traces of subjectivity, partiality and prejudices and remain detached from their objects of study. Evidences would speak for themselves and able to produce an ‘objective’ account of the past, which as closely as possible resembled ‘truth’. Historians could reasonably remain insistent that they were tracking down the truth about the past.
According to Southgate this traditional modernist belief in the attainability of an historical truth that somehow corresponds with the past ‘as it was’ is clearly no longer tenable, but that does not preclude the possibility of retaining some conception of a ‘truth’ that will provide some justification, motivation, and even possibly direction for future historical study. Historical truth is not an achievable goal, nevertheless it is at least something to which aspirations may be directed. We know that objective truth is not attainable but we must still believe that it is attainable.
In this respect one can compare historiography to theology. In theology the concept of God is not ‘fixed’, stable or conclusive. Incomprehensibility defines God’s nature. That is why ‘faith’ in God is needful. So for historians there may be some concept of ‘truth’, similarly undefined, in which some ‘faith’ may be required. Like theological notions of God, historical truths are provisionally useful as being the best we have for the moment, but they are not to be relied upon for ever. Our acceptance of them remains tentative. We continue to search for something better to displace them. The ultimate goal, the ‘truth’, remains elusive, out of reach, beyond us, but our belief that it is there provides the necessary motivation for our continuing search.
Nowadays in historical studies it has become clear to some that different approaches to the past, resulting in different assessments – or versions of the truth – may all, rather than acting as mutual erasers , contribute to a fuller picture. It would seem desirable now to accept and even welcome diversity, without even attempting to force all into a single bed of consistency.
We need to show continuing openness to alternatives, together with an acceptance of transcendence – objective truth – indicating that something exists external to ourselves, and reminding us of our limitations. In historical studies while remaining aware that any insights can only ever be partial, incomplete, inadequate, we may hope to find some ways of reducing chaos to intelligibility. It is this recognition of inadequacy, the falling short of ‘truth’ , that reinforces our ambition to know more. Only by having some conception of the transcendent ‘other’ – ‘truth’ or ‘God’ – will we feel impelled onwards to further questioning. The prescription is, then, not for any assumed security of certitude, but for a never-ending inquiry – a quest for knowledge that has no destination, but constitutes a journey. In history as well as any other subject, the prospect is of an ongoing and dynamic process, without end.
The experimental multi-perspectival approaches enable historians to show that the past is not something fixed, finally caught and preserved for ever. Historians make of the past what they will, or what they can; and their function is to enable their readers to come away with a realisation that ‘history’ is something much more than the representation of a single and coherent narrative thread.
* Southgate, Beverley, History: What and Why? London, Routledge, 2001; Postmodernism in History, London, Routledge, 2003
( English philosopher,1820-1903)
Religion and science agree that the supreme truth about reality is unknowable
Starting either from religious belief or from science, Spencer argued, we are ultimately driven to accept certain indispensable but literally inconceivable notions. Whether we are concerned with a Creator (in religion) or the substratum which underlies our experience of phenomena (in science) , we can frame no conception of it. Therefore, Spencer concluded, religion and science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is only capable of 'relative' knowledge. This is the case since, owing to the inherent limitations of the human mind, it is only possible to obtain knowledge of phenomena, not of the reality ('the absolute') underlying phenomena. Hence both science and religion must come to recognize as the 'most certain of all facts that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.' He called this awareness of 'the Unknowable' and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a positive faith which could substitute for conventional religion. Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last anthropomorphic vestiges.
In saying that man cannot know the Absolute, Spencer affirmed that there is an absolute reality and an absolute truth, albeit unknowable. In the very denial of our power to know what the Absolute is, he assumed that it is; and the making of this assumption proves that the Absolute is always present to the mind, not as a nothing but as a something. The Noumenon for him, everywhere named as the antithesis to the Phenomenon, is necessarily thought of as an actuality. It is impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of Appearance only, without at the same time assuming a Reality of which they are appearances; for appearances without reality is unthinkable.
He maintained that in all commonly accepted beliefs there is an underlying verity. Even beliefs that seem contradictory are in fundamental harmony, and though science and religion may seem in opposition, they really only express opposite sides of the same fact, and thus their views may be reconciled.
The different religious views of the origin and nature of the universe, however opposed in their overt doctrines, are perfectly at one in the conviction that the universe is a mystery, even if one has to acknowledge that they all fail to solve the mystery. In the same way the examination of such ultimate scientific ideas as space and time compels us to admit that all are representative of realities that cannot be comprehended. The explanation of that which is explicable merely points at the unknowable and the inexplicable behind. Ultimate religious ideas and ultimate scientific ideas alike, turn out to be merely symbols of the actual, not cognitions of it.
It is on the basis of this deepest, widest and most certain of all facts--that the power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable – that a reconciliation between science and religion is possible.
* See Kennedy, James G. Herbert Spencer. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978
(German historian, 1880-1936)
Truths are truths only in relation to particular mankind
Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, offers a cyclical interpretation of history. History is seen by him as a number of separate histories, each running through a determinate course. The historical unit is the ‘culture’, each one of which is self-contained. At the root of each culture lies a world-conception which is peculiar to the culture in question. Religion, like every other cultural manifestation, is relative to the culture it belongs, and meaningful only within that culture. Spengler even extends this relativism to the domains of science and philosophy. He claims that “truths are truths only in relation to particular mankind”. His own philosophy, he confesses, expresses and reflects only the Western soul and that soul only in its present civilised phase.
* Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, see Macquarrie, J. Twentieth-century Religious Thought , Harper and Row, New york, 1963, p. 125-127
(Portuguese-Dutch philosopher, 1632-1677)
Truth is the clear intelligibility of ideas
1. Truth, for Spinoza, is a property of ideas , not a property of judgements. Ideas are clear and distinct intellectual ( not sensible) representations of essences. The clarity of the idea is its truth. Truth does not consist in the conformity or correspondence of the idea with its object. Truth is not in the extrinsic mark of conformity with the object but only in the intrinsic mark, that is, the relation of the idea to the intellect that produces it. Spinoza makes use of the scholastic term of adequation: a true idea is an adequate idea. But for Spinoza the adequation that defines the truth is not its relation to the object but its relation to the understanding mind. Therefore Spinoza is concerned with the ontological truth of the idea. An idea that is true is a true idea, one really produced by the mind. He writes always "true idea", as we say "true friend", true gold”, etc. He does not write "an idea that is true".
In other words, truth, for Spinoza , is intelligibility. Still that does not prevent the true idea to be in conformity with its object. In fact, it is so, of necessity. But what is remarkable is that this conformity is not the definition of truth but a secondary property. The idea is in conformity with its object because it is a true idea and not the other way about. Truth itself is not conformity, but intelligibility.
Spinoza like Descartes takes mathematical thinking for the model of all thinking. In mathematics. the mind constructs essences, figures and numbers according to a law: mathematical ideas are independent of the existence of real objects. But unlike Descartes, Spinoza does not need to invoke the veracity of God as a guarantee of the correspondence of ideas and things because Spinoza’s metaphysics demonstrates that there is an exact parallelism between rational thought and things. For him the order of the intellect is a perfect reflection of the order of Nature. According to Descartes’ metaphysical dualism of Thought and Nature (extension), a logical sequence of ideas does not necessarily reflect the order of causes in Nature. A further guarantee is required so that ideas that are clear and distinct are also true, in the sense of corresponding to reality. But this dualism is rejected by Spinoza: the logical self-evidence of a proposition is a sufficient condition of its truth. The necessary connexion of truth with logical adequacy is required by Spinoza’s metaphysical Monism which takes Thought and Extension as two attributes of a single substance. There can be no doubt about the correspondence of thought and the external world. Therefore the problem of truth is not a question of correspondence.
2. The true idea is necessarily recognized as true. There is no true idea without the awareness of its being true. Consequently the true idea excludes all possibility of error and doubt. The true idea is its own criterion. Veritas norma sui et falsi. It reveals its own truth and the falsity of the false like light discloses itself as well as darkness. Scepticism is impossible. Intellectual consciousness cannot err. The sceptic either has no conscience or goes against his conscience or simply refuses to think. Spinoza’s doctrine of truth is a doctrine of reflexive certitude and intellective intuition: such is the “cogito” of his philosophy. Accordingly if error is possible for Spinoza , if a proposition can be said to be false, it is only because it is relatively incomplete or fragmentary. It lacks logical relation with other ideas. Error is the privation of knowledge and not a lack of correspondence or, as Descartes maintained, arising from an infirmity of the will in assenting to an idea that is not clear and dictinct.
All this shows that Spinoza’s view on truth is a qualified form of what has been called subsequently the ‘coherence theory of truth’.
* Spinoza, Ethica more Geometrico Demonstrata, II, 40-47; See Verneaux, Histoire de la Philsophie Morderne, Beauchesne, Paris, 1958, p54-56; also Campbell, R., Truth and Historicity, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, p. 198-202.; Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza, Penguiine Book, UK, 1951, 101-117
(British philosopher of mysticism, 1886-1967)
The essence of religion does not lie in beliefs, but in the religious experience of mystics whose claims, because subjective, are neither true nor false.
Stace critically looks at the claims of mystics from an analytical perspective in philosophy, suspending judgement on the truth or falsity of their claims. One of Stace's most interesting arguments is that mystical experience has more in common across various religions than the members of each religion would accept.
Stace argues that mystical experience is essentially subjective and by itself it doesn't give us objective knowledge about the essential nature of things, nor does it prove any religious doctrines, but it does represent an appropriate expression of the human spirit in terms of its desire for transcendance and to the holy and beautiful in life. The Western, solely rational, man does not see that the essence of religion lies in religious experience, and not in any belief at all, and that all so-called religious beliefs or doctrines are merely theories about the religious experience.
Scientific propositions are, or are intended to be, literally true. Religious propositions are symbolically true. In non-religious symbolism a proposition must be translatable into a literal proposition. In religious symbolism this is impossible, because any literal proposition about God would involve the conceptualization of that which is above all conceptions. But religious symbolism is not on this account mere metaphor, because that which is symbolized is not a proposition about God but the direct apprehension of his presence in religious or mystical intuition.
The divine order is unknowable to the logical intellect. This was the conclusion of Kant: the principle of the negative divine. But to make God completely unknowable is to make an end of religion, the opposite of Kant's intention. There is a way, Stace says, by which God may be known other than by the logical intellect. This is religious intuition which Kant fails to include in his system.
Stace's line of thought is that God is known by revelation in intuitive experience, or not at all. What then is the relation between faith and reason? Faith does not mean blindly believing propositions for which there is no evidence or which are contrary to the evidence. To discover God is the function of faith through intuition. Reason interprets to the intellect the discoveries of faith. It does this by means of symbolic propositions which are mutually consistent, and fall into an ordered system. Within the divine order, faith originates truths; reason interprets them.
* Stace, W.T. Mysticism and Philosophy, Publisher: Tarcher, 1987
(French philosopher of science, b.1963)
Science and spirituality are the two complementary windows of true reality
Some thirty years ago the French bio-chemist Jacques Monod had concluded that “man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of a universe wherefrom he has emerged by chance”. Today such an opinion is seriously contested, notably by Jean Staune in his book Notre existence a-t-elle un sens?: « Man at last knows that he participates to something that stands beyond him and has meaning”. He argues that today’s science has come to know that it cannot know everything. He is convinced that modern science reveals a growing number of uncertainties which seem to open the door to mysteries of metaphysical nature. To have access to the ultimate reality, one must appeal to other modes of knowledge than the scientific, such as mystical intuition and spirituality. Science and spirituality are the two complementary windows that allow human beings to apprehend reality.
Staune explains how we have come today through recent scientific discoveries to a “paradigm of incompleteness”. It shows that it is not only nonsensical to give a spiritual meaning to the universe, but also it invites us to do so. Quantic physics, for instance, has shown that a non physical dimension of reality can exist, without violating any physical laws. The classical monistic affirmation that “all is matter” has no longer any meaning from a scientific point of view. The science of today induces us to break away from a materialistic, reductionist and mechanistic vision of the world.
Scientific progress has reached its own limits : we know now that there exists a beyond of reality to which we have no access. This means that science reveals negatively (“en creux”) the existence of another level of reality. This awareness that there is a radical incompleteness of this world opens the way to a metaphysical reflection on what man perceives intuitively through religious belief. Dualism, which is the absolute enemy of materialistic monism and according to which spirit separated from matter can exist , is again believable.
*Staune Jean, Notre Existence a-t-elle un sens ?, Presses de la Rennaissance, Paris,2007
(German philosopher and Carmelite nun, 1891-1942)
Faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means
Philosophers want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, they should take these truths from whatever source presents itself to them, even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. They should not say: we will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Such is Edith Stein’s view for whom the way of faith is richer than the way of philosophical thought because it gives us God who gives us an assurance that no natural knowledge is capable to offer us. But she admits that the way of faith is obscure. One must tread on the path of truth in the presence of Truth itself. “ The truth that has revealed itself to my soul, she writes, is the essence of the Truth, that has no beginning and no end. From this Truth depend all other truths.”
For years she had be searching for the Truth in philosophy, the truth of things, the objective truth given by the facts. Later in her life she discovered the truth of the God that is Love, and for her this is not a matter of knowledge but of relation.
If faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, for Stein there is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith.
To the objection: ‘what guarantees have we that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective’, her answer is that there are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation. One must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and in any case the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.
All that can be done is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he should give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace.
*Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000
( British literary critic, 1743-1826}
There can be no truth transcending experience
Leslie Stephen is a staunch advocate of agnosticism which he understands in a sense close to that of T. H. Huxley. To be an agnostic, according to him, is to affirm "what no one denies," namely "that there are limits to the sphere of human intelligence" and also to affirm the empiricist thesis "that those limits are such as to exclude ‘metempirical knowledge', that is, all forms of knowledge of a transcendent, numinal, nonempirical sort. Theology lies within this forbidden sphere."
Stephen makes apparent the empiricist commitments of his conception of agnosticism in characterizing ‘gnosticism’, the view agnosticism is deliberately set against. To be a ‘Gnostic’ for him is to believe that "we can attain truths not capable of verification and not needing verification by actual experiment or observation. But the agnostic, firmly in the empiricist tradition, denies that there can be any knowledge of the world, including anything about its origin and destiny, which transcends experience”. The ‘gnostic’ putative knowledge, Stephen maintains, is illusory and not something "essential to the highest interests of mankind, providing us, as speculative metaphysicians believe, with the solution to ‘the dark riddle of the universe’."
We have "the most sacred obligations to recognize the facts" and make our judgments in accordance with the facts. But the facts do not give us grounds for confidence in the viability of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Rather we are strongly inclined when we inspect these beliefs to take them for wish fulfillments. And while it may indeed be true that for the moment dreams may be pleasanter than realities, it is also true that if we are bent on attaining a more permanent measure of happiness, it "must be won by adapting our lives to the realities," for we know from experience that illusory consolations "are the bitterest of mockeries". Agnosticism, Stephen concludes, is the only reasonable and viable stand for the truth seeker.
* Stephen Leslie, An Agnostic’s Apology, 1893
(American philosopher, b. 1943)
Truth is neither intrinsically nor instrumentally valuable
Stich’s claim is that when we come to a proper understanding of the nature of truth, we cease to find it either intrinsically or instrumentally valuable.
1. Most people who currently value true belief never consider other options than their own. In a world with many alternatives to truth, we ought to decide which is best for us rather than simply accepting the one we inherit. Yet, contends Stich, people who reflect on the options and still value truth are not much better, for "they are making a profoundly conservative choice; they are letting tradition determine their cognitive values without any attempt at critical evaluation of that tradition". Stich thinks that the existence of equally commendable alternatives reduces the attractiveness of sticking by the intrinsic value of truth. Were we to reflect on all the options for interpretation functions and to choose one, we would not have an obvious means of choosing one because of their lack of distinguishing features. Stich faults those who currently value truth for doing so unreflectively, and the value of truth is lessened for those who do reflect on it because the function that provides truth conditions is merely one unimaginative function among many. He concludes that truth is not intrinsically valuable.
2. Moreover he claims that truth is not even instrumentally valuable. He argues that true beliefs are not always optimal in the pursuit of happiness or pleasure or desire satisfaction, nor are they always the best beliefs to have if what we want is peace or power or love, or some weighted mix of all of these. Sometimes it would be better to have false beliefs than to have true beliefs. Stich knows of no argument that attempts to show that true beliefs do a better job than these other options "in general, or in the long run". Since we know that truth is not always preferable, he thinks it a difficult task to show that it is even generally preferable to all other options. Since some other options may be more efficacious, Stich thinks it doubtful that truth has instrumental value.
He labels his own position "epistemic pragmatism." He does not see cognitive systems as valuable in themselves; instead, they are valuable as means to ends. To be better than another option, a cognitive system must be more efficacious in promoting desirable ends. Cognitive systems are tools whose normative status depends upon their ability to produce effects that cohere with our values.
* Stich Steven , The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation, MIT Press, 1990
(German philosopher, 1806-1856)
Truth is an individual’s property: it is MY truth
In his book “The Ego and its Owner”, Stirner states that nothing stands above the EGO. He passes in review all the abstract concepts that coerce and dominate the individual. He turns the table in submitting them to the EGO. God, nation, society, humanity, freedom, truth and all values are only means of enslavement of the individual through ideas, which unfortunately he himself has created and now escape his ownership. What is the ownership of the individual? Everything he can master. Thus a truth that he does not master, in as much as it is an external command in which he believes, is a manifestation of the individual’s submission. The real ‘truth’ is in fact the individual’s property, the sign of his freedom which extends as far as he can, wills or desires. Stirner’s truth consists in nothing other than man’s revelation of himself, and thereto belongs to the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the release from all abstractions and external authorities, the re-appropriation of naturalness. The individual must discover his uniqueness in getting rid of the scourge of idols, phantoms, fixed ideas and ideologies that estrange him. No longer ruled, governed, enslaved by “sacred” powers, whether they be the Gods of religions, the absolute Spirit of Idealism (Hegel) and even more the abstract essence of Humanity (Feuerbach), he recovers the fullness and truth of his being. Stirner reasons in this way. Neither God nor humanity have placed their ‘cause’ in anything than themselves. Similarly I, the individual, place my ‘cause’ in myself. As much as God and Humanity, I am the negation of anything or any one else. I am whole and unique. I am not complaining of being void and empty. I am not nothingness in the sense of emptiness but in the sense of creative nothingness, a nothingness from which the creator that I am can draw anything. Away with a cause that is not my cause! Should one remonstrate and say: “your cause at least should be a ‘good’ cause” I retort: “what is good, what is bad? I am myself my cause and I am neither good nor bad. Good and bad are meaningless for me”. The divine is God’s cause, the human is man’s cause. My cause is neither divine nor human nor values such as truth, goodness, justice, freedom, etc. It simply is mine; it is nothing general or universal, it is unique, because I am unique. For me, there is nothing above myself. I place my cause in nothing. There is no other truth than my truth.
*Stirner, Max, The Ego and His Own, New York, Benj Tuckker, 1907
(Contemporary American theologian)
The role of metaphoric language in expressing religious truth
1. Religious thinkers have always been perplexed about the difficulty of using human, too human language to speak of what is transcendent. In the medieval period we find three options that traditionally have provided the only choices in religious language. Thomas Aquinas argued that religious language is analogical, that is, it conveys truth but not literal truth. Duns Scotus rejected Aquinas’ view in favour of univocal language. A minority opted for a third way, the negative, non-cognitive or equivocal way according to which all words must be negated to understand Ultimate Reality. Aquinas and Duns Scotus had ruled out the mystical-equivocal option because, they said, God has communicated to us about the divine nature. Duns Scotus concluded that the language of revelation must be necessarily univocal, conveying literal truth. The only alternative to univocal language, for him, was equivocation and scepticism. But Aquinas, before him, had not accepted the dilemma between univocal and equivocal and defended the way of analogical knowledge in order do justice to the intentions of the two other ways, and avoid their drawbacks.
2. Contemporary philosophical discussions have continued to deal with similar issues and provided new insights into the nature of both univocal and analogical language. The important event has been the growing philosophical significance of metaphor. Discovery of the importance of metaphor in the twentieth century has been central to understand how religious language stretches the literal meaning of words and thus has contributed to a reinstatement of a properly understood analogy. Traditionally metaphors were taken for figures of speech or ornaments of language, important in poetics and rhetoric but nor for philosophy or theology. Today’s philosophical landscape has radically changed. Metaphorical language is no longer seen as a deviation from “normal” speech ( Aristotle). Hobbes and Locke vehemently dismissed metaphor as harmful to the cause of truth. It can be trusted as a rhetoric device but useless when it comes to treating the truth. Logical positivism, through their distinction of cognitive and emotive language, disparaged all forms of figurative language. But for the new perspective on metaphor, metaphor is seen at the heart of cognitive language. It is irreplaceable. It says sometimes what has not be said before and cannot be said in any other way. Metaphor is defined as saying one thing and meaning another, or speaking about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another. Metaphor directs us to what we have never seen before. Its primary reference is negated only to open up reference at another level. More importantly, what metaphor evokes cannot usually be replaced by univocal expositions. However metaphor is imprecise and vague and this ensuing inexactness is often what has bothered philosophers and led them to prefer univocal language. Their major criticism is that metaphor cannot be used in a syllogism. However nowadays the seeming “clarity” of univocal language has been put in question. Metaphor is not an optional or superfluous addition to univocal language. Its cognitive value is recognized. Recent philosophies claim that metaphor is as crucial as literal language. They reject the tradition that denigrated the capacity for truth of figurative language. The new movements in fact reduce the difference between the truth-bearing capacity of language. Both analogical and symbolic language are indirect and inexact pointers to truth, but both may point to truth.
The attempts to find univocal precision and to reduce figurative, analogical language to univocal language is seen as an imposition of false and unnecesary requirements. The standards of what is to count as cognitive are raised too high. We have to break the spell of this standard. Rather than attempting to determine whether we can explain a metaphor precisely in using other, usually literal, terms, the important thing is to do with metaphor what we do with univocal language, namely, to determine its meaning. Metaphor can be regarded as making a truth claim without being reduced to being a literal truth claim. Religious language understands a metaphor such as “God is our heavenly Father” to say something about God, a partially descriptive even though vague aspect of the divine reality. In any case the genuine new approach of metaphor has reopened a viable third way between a univocal and equivocal approach, the way of analogical knowledge that Aquinas had opened in the thirteenth century .
One has to admit that the philosophy of language cannot settle truth claims but it can lead to greater sensitivity to the role of language and that is its significant contribution. The philosophy of language will be needed as long as people use language about religion.
° Stiver, Dan R., The Philosophy of Religious Language, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996
(Australian philosopher, 1927-1994)
The rejection of Popper’s view of truth as ‘conjectural’
Stove admits that one can consider him as “a purely negative thinker”. He is known mostly for his attack on what he calls the ‘irrationalism that infests modern philosophy of science’, in particular the sort of relativist and “social constructivist” views current in sociology of science and postmodernism, in which modern science is regarded as no better (or worse) than astrology.
Much of Stove’s effort in this matter is expended in attacking what he sees as the source of these views, namely Karl Popper’s claim that while we can refute theories, we can never have any reason to think that a theory is true or, more to the point, that we can never have any reason to think that one theory is more likely to be true than another. He accuses Popper to hold that we have no grounds whatsoever to suppose that our past experience is any guide to the future, an affront, says Stone, not only to scientific reasoning but to common sense.
Stove alleges that the aim of science in Popper's view is not to seek truth but to find untruth. Popper's insistence on the provisional nature of scientific theories, on what he calls 'conjectural knowledge' is regarded by Stove as irrational in the extreme. Popper, in effect, denies the accumulation of scientific knowledge because, if it is all provisional, then it cannot be knowledge. Knowledge, for Stove, always means knowledge of the truth, and truth cannot bear the adjective 'conjectural'. The concept of 'conjectural knowledge' is a nonsense, a contradiction in terms, and leads to the relativist denial of objective truth.
Several critics have pointed out, against Stone’s criticism of Popper, that it is no more unreasonable to talk of 'conjectural knowledge' than to talk of 'partial knowledge', which everybody does without batting an eyelid. All Popper means by 'conjectural knowledge', is 'the knowledge we have so far on the basis of our unfalsified theories', that is, those theories which when tested are found to have verisimilitude with empirical facts. That Popper believed fiercely in objective truth (in its non-absolute sense) is evidenced from his constant stress that the job of the scientist is the quest for truth.
* Stove David, Against the Idols of the Age, ed. Roger Kimball, New Brunswick (US) and London (UK): Transaction, 1999.
(German born American political philosopher, 1899-1973)
According to Leo Strauss, the American political philosopher much appreciated by several neo-conservatist political figures in the USA, philosophy and truth are not meant for all. Philosophy has always to go underground and conceal itself in some way because it deals with truth while society is based on opinion and opinion subverts truth. This is the basis of Strauss' political philosophy.
He contends that philosophy and truth are not meant for all. Even more he claims that philosophical truth is deadly and dangerous to society. It looks as if truth is so terrible that it threatens to wreak havoc on society unless it is kept secret. Indeed Strauss considers religion and morality as two of the biggest but most pious swindles ever perpetrated on the human race. But he adds that there would be no human race were it not for these swindles. It is therefore of the utmost importance that they be sustained and nurtured. For surely, no society could survive in the absence of religion and morality.
Truth is too hard for people to bear, and the classical appeal to "virtue" as the object of human endeavor is unattainable. Hence it is necessary to tell lies to people about the nature of political reality. An elite recognizes the truth, however, and keeps it to itself. This gives it insight, and implicitly power that others do not possess. Machiavelli was right: there is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must restrict free inquiry and exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order.
Strauss has no objection about using deception in politics, he even sees it as a necessity. He believes that societies should be hierarchical - divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. Those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the inferior. This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled. The people are told what they need to know and no more. While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, the masses cannot not cope with it. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy. That is why Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control. At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion are "a pious fraud."
* See Drury, Shadia Leo Strauss and the American Right. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
(British philosopher, 1919)
Strawson reacts against the traditional concept of truth as relation (between mind and reality) or property (of sentences: “p is true”) but even more he reacts against the concept of truth that has arisen from semanticist like Tarski for whom the function of “true” in sentences like “‘X is Y’ is true” must be descriptive as if to say that a statement is true is to make a statement about a statement (in describing the statement as true). Strawson’s thesis is that the function of “ true” is not descriptive but confirmatory; that is, its function is like to say “yes” in reply to a question.
For Strawson, truth does not apply to sentences and propositions. Truth is not a property of symbols. Its function is not to be a property at all but to convey something totally different than describing. According to him, saying that a statement is true says nothing more than the original statement. Linguistically speaking, the truth-predicate is useless. Strawson agrees (partly) with Ramsey’s “redundancy theory” (see Ramsey for the “redundancy theory”). Still only partly, because for Strawson using language is not just a matter of conveying information. Attributing truth to a proposition is not simply redundant, it fulfils a performative function. We do not say that a statement “is true” only in order to say something ( useless) about it, but to endorse it and give performative force to what we say. When we say ‘is true’, we mean ‘ I promise’, ‘I agree’, ‘I do’, ‘Yes’. We do not say anything more than the statement, we only confirm it. To say ‘is true’ is a gesture. It is not to make a statement about a statement, it is to perfom an act of endorsing it. Therefore the performative theory of truth adds something important to the redundancy theory. It satisfies our inclination to believe that “ is true” has a function to play in what we say, not linguistically’ but performatorilly.
As a follower of Strawson writes (Price): “Truth is a mythical goal of enquiry”. It is beneficient to subscribe to such a myth because it has a behavioural advantage. In using the predicates “true” and “false” we point out to others our agreement or disagreement. But nothing more than that.
2. Some critics are not satisfied with Strawson’s performative theory of truth. For them the question remains: if the statement is endorsed or rejected ( by the saying of “is true” and “is false”), why is it endorsed or rejected? It may be the case that it is endorsed because it is true ! If the word “true” is a vehicle for endorsement, it may be that the truth of the statement is the reason for endorsement.
In other words performatory utterances cannot be purely performatory, they must be based upon ‘ what is the case’; they must refer to some reality. Of course the anti-realist position of Strawson and Price does not allow them to go beyond the purely subjective understanding of truth. The issue amounts to a debate between realism and anti-realism, which was the topic of a famous – and complex - debate between Austin (who holds the realist view of a correspondence) and Strawson (who holds the anti-realist position).
* Strawson, P.F. Truth, in Truth,ed. by Pitcher G., Ptrentice-Hall, N.Y. 1964, p 32-54; see Johnson, L.E., Focussing on Truth, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 77-82, 154-175
(American philosopher of religion, 1933-1993)
The understanding of truth in religion cannot be limited to a conception of truth as a relationship between words or between ideas and things. Religious truth is not philosophical truth because the object of religious knowing is not simply information about things, persons and world; it is the recognition of the deepest reality for the fulfilment of life. This reality called God, Dharma, Tao or Nirvana etc. is the original source, the expression of what-is at the deepest level. Religious truth is a transforming orientation leading to superlative well-being, known in religious traditions as the conversion from sin to salvation, illusion to insight, bondage to freedom, and chaos to order. Religious truth is a solution to the process of self-deception, the correcting process that operates a comprehensive transformation of one’s life-orientation. One can discern five different approaches or ways of knowing the truth to achieve the deepest well-being possible, sometimes called heaven, salvation, liberation, total harmony or nirvana.
1. The ultimate truth is sometimes known through the intimate extraordinary experience of spiritual presence. The validity of this truth depends on the direct experience of such a presence. It transcends any other norms of validity. The perception of such divine disclosure provides a direction for living and a principle of knowledge unavailable anywhere else.
2. The ultimate truth is often expressed through symbols, sacred myths, sacramental rites and initiations. The validity for truth in religious symbolic expression is found in the recognition that its source is the eternal realm of the sacred. The deepest problem in life arises from forgetting one ‘s sacred source, the basis for all well-being. The duplication of the sacred realm in symbolic gestures, physical objects, names and sounds discloses the hidden eternal, genuine and pure reality – the opposite of the profane, corrupt and fragmented mundane human experience.
3. A third approach to religious truth is through practical moral wisdom characterised by honesty, truthworthiness and sincerity. This expression of truth is found strikingly in Chinese and Indian sources, which both appeal to a natural cosmic order (dharma). The truth of life is known not through a personal experience of a divine presence or rational reflection but through living out a sensitivity to the inherent cosmic harmony within the self and the world.
4. Fourthly truth in religion may be viewed as the accurate self-consciousness of what-is . The key-condition for attaining truth is the avoidance of attachment to conventional habits of knowing. The concern for transforming the mode of knowing is crucial. Truth is realization and this realization requires an insight into the manner and quality of one’s awareness. The hearer of truth must be prepared to receive it with a pure and liberated mind. This requires more than intellectual skills, but quieting the mind through meditation, mental concentration, dhyana or yoga. For a true submission to God the ego must vanish. The highest truth is reached in emptying the self of its conventional consciousness so as to open the way to the manifestation of the ultimate reality.
5. The fifth approach to truth in religion is to respond with the intellect to the meaning found in the outside objective reality. Classical Greek philosophy had a significant influence on Christian and Islamic theologies on the way they have addressed the issue of truth. Truth is universal and can be expressed in universally valid concepts. This cognitive, propositional, approach to truth has led to the formulation of religious doctrines and dogmas, presented to the intellectual assent of believers.
Thus truth in world religions is a concept that has not only different meanings and uses but also indicates different approaches to the religious concern of attaining the highest well-being. The different approaches have their own principles of validation. Each of them is open to criticism and the basic question that arises is how religious knowledge of the transcendental reality is related to the common human means of knowing. Since the nature of religious truth, it is argued, is so different from any communicable description of it, the so called truth claims of religions indicate more about the simply subjective conditions of the knower than about any universal objective reality.
Today there is a heightened sense of urgency to develop strategies for discovering of the principle of unity of the various religious truth claims. In those communities that identify their survival with a single form of truth, through orthodoxy and orthopraxy, the tolerance of alternative approaches to truth is difficult to maintain. But the fact is that the contemporary world is characterised by the development of a world-wide communication network. This situation requires new concepts of the self and the universe and an exchange of cultural and religious approaches to truth. The survival and well-being of people in all cultures necessitates a creative re-examination of the critical assessment of the various religious truth claims.
* Streng, F.J. Truth, in the Hastings Encyclopedia for Religion and Ethics, New York, Macmillan, 1987
(Spanish theologian, 1548-1617)
1. The topic under consideration is not the truth of existence but the truth of propositions signifying the identity of two terms, such as mathematical and logical truths which are eternal and necessary. The truth of such propositions is rooted in essences considered simply in themselves and apart from what actually exists. The problem about these eternal necessary truths is about their relation to God. Are these eternal truths prior to God, and thus independent of him ? Augustine identified the eternal truths and God. Indeed his argument for the existence of God was that “there are eternal truths, therefore God exists”. In identifying the eternal truth with God he followed somewhat Plotinus who had placed the eternal ideas in the Intellect, the Logos, the first emanation of the immutable One. Likewise Thomas Aquinas placed the eternal truths and ideas in the mind of God.
But Francisco Suarez, the 16th c. philosopher-theologian, thought differently. His thesis was that propositions concerning essences are true not because they are known by God, rather they are known by him because they are true. Like all scholastic philosopher-theologians, Suarez makes a distinction between the will and the intellect of God. Whatever is dependent of the divine will is a contingent entity. Therefore, reasons Suarez, the eternal truths cannot be brought about by God for if they were that would be by an act of his will in which case these truths would no longer be necessary. The ultimate foundation of the necessity of these truths are to be found in the essences themselves, not in the divine model, otherwise the autonomy of essences would be compromised. Hence the eternal truths are the object of the divine gaze, not the product of any divine operation. They are known by God because they are true. Suarez denies that they are true because God knows them.
2. It is noteworthy that Descartes condemned Suarez’s views on eternal truths for being blasphemous and dangerous. The God of Suarez looks like a demiurge who contemplates the ideas! Descartes' way out of this problem is in denying the distinction between the divine intellect and the divine will, which lies at the root of the discussion. God's will and understanding are one. The eternal truths are the result of a divine operation, they depend on him. It is by the same causality that God creates the world and that he creates the eternal truths. But then how shoud one understand that these eternal truths are necessary? Should we not say that everything depending on God's will is contingent? Descartes answers that God has laid down the laws of nature just as a king lays down the laws for his kingdom. These laws are inborn in men's mind just as a king would imprint his laws in the hearts of his subjects. Thus the eternal truths are unchangeable and eternal in the sense that God's will is not fickle. Descartes, unlike Suarez, claims that God is the creator of the eternal truths. Aquinas’s solution was different: for him the eternal truths are internalized within God, that is, the eternity of the eternal truths derives solely from their being in the divine intellect.
* Suarez, F., Disputationes Metaphysicae, XXXI, quoted in Campbell R., Truth and Historicity, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, p. 94-97
(Mystical tradition of Islam, mostly from 1200 to 1500)
Sufism recognizes one central truth: the unity (Wahdat) of being. All phenomena are manifestations of a single reality, which is al-Haq (Truth, God). The essence of being/Truth/God is devoid of every form and quality, and hence unmanifest, yet it is inseparable from every form and phenomenon either material or spiritual. It is often understood to imply that every phenomenon is an aspect of Truth and at the same time attribution of existence to it is false. The chief aim of all Sufis then is to let go of all notions of duality (and therefore of the individual self also), and realize the divine unity which is considered to be the truth. Human beings are not separate from the divine.
Sufism is sometimes interpreted as a positive and healthy reaction to the overly rational activity of philosophers and theologians. For the Sufis, the road to truth and certainty can never be confined to the process of rational or purely intellectual activity, without sapiential knowledge (zawq, "taste") and the direct, immediate experience of the Heart. Truth, they believe, can be sought and found only with one's entire being. They are not satisfied merely to know the Truth. They insist on a total identification with it: a "passing away" of the knower in the Known, of subject in the Object of knowledge. This insistence of total involvement in "mystical" realisation, and on a participative understanding of religious doctrine, sharply distinguished Sufism from other Islamic schools of thought. In fact, considering themselves the true core of Islam, Sufis appeared as outsiders not only to philosophers and theologians, but even to "ordinary" Islam.
Al Halláj, the legendary Iranian Sufi master (858 - 922 AD) is reported to have said: "I am the Truth" (i.e., God), something people at the time found offensive. As a result, he was found guilty of heresy and put to death.
The following metaphor, credited to an unknown Sufi scholar, helps describe this line of thought. "There are three ways of knowing a thing. Take for instance a flame. One can be told of the flame, one can see the flame with one's own eyes, and finally one can reach out and be burned by it. In this way, we Sufis seek to be burned by God."
Truth for the Sufis is the realization of the absolute unity of reality and that unity is God.
*See Sufism, in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
( Persian philosopher, 1155- 1191)
Intuitive knowledge gives access to the divine realm of metaphysical truths
What constitutes, for Suhrawardi, real knowledge is based on immediate and intuitive knowledge. Whereas the Peripatetics had extolled intellection, Suhrawardi brings direct intuition or mystical contemplation to the forefront, as an alternative — more reliable — foundation of certainty. Intuitive knowledge provides access to a priori truths of which discursive knowledge can only be subsequently validated through a posteriori demonstrations.
Suhrawardi analyzes the notions of apperception and self-awareness and alludes to a pre-logical mode of perception that remains distinct from intellection. He discusses the primary awareness of the soul's existence, its self-identity, the unmediated character of this particular type of knowledge. He provides various arguments to demonstrate the existence of a type of knowledge that is self-evident, a priori and unmediated through any type of abstraction and representation of forms, whether it be through an image, a form, a notion or an attribute of the self. The perception of pain becomes the model of self-knowledge as unmediated perception, i.e., a non discursive, non-conceptual and non-propositional type of knowledge that, nonetheless, does constitute a mode of knowing distinct from discursive knowledge. Similar to pain, self-knowledge provides yet another illustration of the type of epistemic process that Suhrawardi considers being at the heart of intuitive knowledge. In Suhrawardi's ‘science of lights’, the object of perception — light — cannot be known discursively, but only through an immediate presence or awareness of its luminosity. Mystical vision and contemplation operate through this intuitive process of knowing metaphysical lights. Individuals achieve such states through spiritual and ascetic practices that enable them to detach themselves from the darkness of the world in its quest for the apperception of those lights. Intuitive knowledge thus constitutes a superior means of accessing the luminous reality and the divine realm of metaphysical truths.
Direct intuition lies at the heart of Suhrawardi's 'prophetology', inasmuch as only the most perfect sage who witnesses those truths, whether he be a prophet or not, deserves God's vice-regency. Individuals who have access to those metaphysical lights can be invested with the vice-regency of God, depending on the degree of their receptivity and the purity of their hearts. The epistemic process by which mystics have all had access to those metaphysical truths and divine realms remains quite similar to the process by which prophets have accessed the same divine and metaphysical truths.
* See Amin Razavi, M. Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination, Richmond: Curzon, (1997)
(American philosopher of inter-religious dialogue , b. 1929)
In modern times there has been a dramatic shift in the understanding of truth. To the old traditional concept of an absolute, static and exclusive truth is substituted a de-absolutized, dynamic, evolutive and dialogical concept of truth. Swidler discerns six areas of knowledge which have contributed to the new understanding of the notion of truth.
1. History. All truth holds only in relation to the historical context in which it has been produced. Therefore it is involved in constant change.
2. Sociology. Truth is related to the cultural milieu in which the speaker and hearer of a communication of truth live, the class they belong to and their sex have an influence on the truth communicated.
3. Linguisctics. Truth is bound up with language and thus limited to its frontiers. Thus it expresses a partial, selective, perspective view of reality.
4. Hermeneutics. Truth is subject to interpretation. All experience relates back to a horizon of understanding, to the pre-understanding of the person experiencing it. The knower knows in his and her own way. As Aquinas said: everything that is known is known admodum cognoscentis.
5. Dialectics; Truth is dialogical and this means that knowledge is achieved not in the mode of a one-sided acceptance of givens but reciprocally in dialogue with other truth-seekers, following the model of question and answer.
6. Pragmatics. Statements about truth are also related to the action-oriented intention of the thinker.
Thus there can be no longer any question of absoluteness of truth in the sense of something that transcends time and culture, independent of world-view and set apart from history.
The absolutist view of truth is an obstacle to dialogue. Only those who have a de-absolutised view of truth are ready to engage in dialogue. When particular thought-categories are taken for the only valid way to describe reality, all other descriptions of the significance of human experience are considered deviant and mistaken.. The de-absolutised mentality does not eschew affirmations, but it is aware that such affirmations are not the only way to conceive reality. Being limited, they are always open to being supplemented and enriched. Only those with a mentality of an at least minimal de-absolutised understanding of truth feel the need and urgency to enter into dialogue.
* Swidler, Leonard, Towards a Universal Theology of Redligion,Orbis Book, Maryknoll, NY, 1988, p.6-13
(English philosopher, b.1934)
Swinburne is a staunch advocate of theism, the best metaphysical theory for him to explain reality. In contrast with the view that theology deals with revealed truths, the view he adopts considers theism as a philosophical theory. It would not make sense to evaluate revealed truth, but theistic philosophy can legitimately be argued for or against.
Swinburne sees his activity as formulating a scientific hypothesis to explain all the facts of the world. He describes how science explains things. He decides to use 'simplicity' as the criterion to choose between possible scientific hypotheses. He tries to show that theism is an explanation of the facts of the world and that the evidence gives a significant degree of probability to the claim that God exists.
In order to build a cumulative case for theism, he uses “Bayesian” reasoning (the philosophy of Bayesianism, which motivates the use of probabilities in decision making). He argues that the probability of theism is raised by such things as the existence of the universe, its order, the existence of consciousness, human opportunities to do good, the pattern of history, evidence of miracles and religious experience. Besides he maintains that the existence of evil does not count against the existence of God. The conclusion is that on our total evidence theism is more probable than not.
In Swinburne’s theory of logical probability, the notion of simplicity occupies centre stage. Basically the idea is that a simpler hypothesis is more probably true and so the simplest hypothesis is the one most probably true. For him the idea of simplicity is indicative of truth as it is a prime determinant of intrinsic probability. Simple explanations and hypotheses are more likely to be true than complicated ones. He takes pain to defend the view that the theistic explanation is the simplest than can be conceived, and therefore the most likely to be true.
* Swinburne, Richard, Simplicity and Evidence of truth, Aquinas lecture, Marquette University, Milwaukee, 1997