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- You will be hearing more—and not just from Wills—that only belief, not reason, matters now in America. In September, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an excerpt of Michael Lynch's forthcoming True to Life: Why Truth Matters, from MIT Press. Most of the published portion concerns what the Bush Administration said and says about Iraq, but Lynch takes aim at some broader principles. As a country, "we are rather cynical about the value of truth," he says. Stanley Fish and Bill Bennett are both to blame. "Under the banner of postmodernism, cynicism about truth and related notions like objectivity and knowledge has become the semiofficial philosophical stance of many academic disciplines. Roughly speaking, the attitude is that objective truth is an illusion and what we call truth is just another name for power," Lynch writes. Meanwhile, moralists decry relativism and hope to reawaken America to the truth "that we are right, and everyone else is wrong," when in fact, "truth means that you have to be open to the possibility that your own beliefs are mistaken." Both of these points are familiar but probably necessary to reiterate, including Lynch's (albeit quasi-empiricist) conclusion that "we distinguish truth from falsity because we need a way of distinguishing right answers from wrong ones." As Lynch notes, "The most terrifying aspect of Orwell's Ministry of Truth isn't its ability to get people to keep people from speaking their minds, or even to believe lies; it is its success at getting them to give up on the idea of truth altogether." Article
Related:The Truth Wars and Reason and the Left from Butterflies and Wheels - "The future of philosophy has been a concern for philosophy ever since its inception," wrote Claire Elise Katz in the Winter 2004 issue of CrossCurrents. And it still is. After seeing a Reader's Digest joke that majoring in philosophy teaches you to ask the questions, 'What is existence?' 'What is the essence of things?', and, 'Do you want fries with that?', Katz says "it is difficult to imagine presently that an educational theory that promotes philosophy as part of the curriculum would be taken seriously, much less a political philosophy whose primary aim is the flourishing of philosophy and philosophers." But to make it happen Katz says, philosophy must return to Socrates' mandate—"Know thyself"—or, better yet, to Plato's modest elaboration on it: "Know thyself, mortal." "This expansion of the phrase … appears to command one to know one's boundaries and limitations; one ought to know who one is, and more importantly, who one is not." The command extends to thinking critically about texts, including Hebrew ones, as Katz explains. After a reflection on the intersection between philosophy and religion, Katz concludes, "I often vacillate in my belief that philosophy is elitist. In one sense, it is elitist; not everyone can do it nor can everyone do it well." And yet, "I do believe that it is a 'good thing' for everyone to be exposed to it." And so Katz concludes, "I suggest that the future of philosophy means a return to one of its original objectives: to know thyself. I propose that philosophy's future be thought in terms of negotiating the tension between its appeal to the elite (and therefore its apparent exclusivity) and its usefulness to the ordinary citizen. We would create the habits of thinking and reflecting that would become an integral part of every person's life."
- How can this happen? You could start with Calvin Seerveld's guidelines on how to teach a Christian course on introduction to philosophy, from the archives of Dordt College's publication Pro Rege, posted earlier this year by philosophy professor Gideon Strauss. Seerveld explains how he set up his intro course at Trinity Christian College in 1959:
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