TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, Bernard Williams explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine. His approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, blends philosophy, history, and a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. Without denying that we should worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted, he defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value. TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. Bernard Williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything.

Bernard Williams is Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, and also teaches philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

WAHRHEIT UND WAHRHAFTIGKEIT
Deutsch von Joachim Schulte
[HC Suhrkamp 10/03]