Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 34 - December 2021/February 2022 i New Philosopher

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”William Shakespeare Since time immemorial, humans have held honesty aloft as a virtue, with Truth as the ultimate good. This is hardly surprising; after all, what society could survive long without Truth as its backbone? Greek orator Aeschines claimed that “Truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries”, while Roman scholar Cicero stated that “man is distinguished by his pursuit and investigation of Truth”. Shakespeare too extolled the virtue of leading an honest life. More recently, 19th century German poet Goethe wrote that “nothing is great but Truth, and the smallest truth is great”, while the English novelist and poet Dinah Craik quipped that “no virtue ever was founded on a lie”. Judge William Clark, echoing the sentiment of jurists through the ages,…

DBC Pierre DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Vernon God Little, which was also awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 – the first time the two awards had been granted to the same book. Pierre is also the author of Ludmilla’s Broken English, Lights out in Wonderland, a book of short stories, and a novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. He was awarded the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. Regina Rini Regina Rini is Canada Research Chair in Social and Moral Cognition and Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University. Rini has a research background in moral psychology, ethical theory, and neuroscience, and was previously Assistant Professor of Bioethics at NYU. She is working on new projects…

“Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.”—Kevin Kelly, co-founder, Wired magazine It is a truth universally acknowledged that we now live in a post-truth world. Indeed, it may be the last thing we can all agree on. For though we may agree that truth is dead, there is no such consensus about the killer. Was it social media? Or the internet? Or cable news networks? Or was it postmodernism? Or modernism? Depending on your point of view, you could go as far back as the Reformation. One prime suspect for truth-killer-in-chief is French philosopher Bruno Latour, one of the leading figures in Science…

Consider a few of the things I did during the 24 hours before beginning to write this article. I watched an hour-long episode of a TV drama my friends had recommended, long after it became clear it wasn’t one for me. I spent twenty minutes replying by email to a sort-of-friend who, if I’m honest, doesn’t play a particularly important role in my life. And I wasted the usual hour or two on social media. I’ll stop there, because this list is exceedingly dull – which, in a way, is the point: I used my precious time in some notably half-hearted ways. And at the risk of giving offence, I’m willing to bet that you did too. Yet as multiple philosophers and other wise minds have noted, there’s something fascinating…

Lying is a common social phenomenon. It occurs regularly in various social contexts for a multitude of purposes. For children, there are two types of lies that are of great importance during their socialisation. One type is the lies that violate moral rules, as they are typically told to benefit oneself at the expense of others. Due to the anti-social nature of this type of lie, it is universally discouraged by children’s caregivers and teachers from a very early age. The other type of lies are lies that are told with an intention to help, not harm, another individual (e.g., faking liking an undesirable gift in front of a gift-giver) and are thus prosocial in nature. EXPERIMENT 1: In terms of children’s actual behaviour in a politeness situation – faking…

Regina Rini is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University in Toronto. Rini writes about moral agency, moral disagreement, the psychology of moral judgment, partisanship in political epistemology, and the moral status of artificial intelligence. She is the winner of the 2018 Marc Sanders Award for Public Philosophy and has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Practical Ethics, as well as the academic journals Philosophical Studies, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Philosophers’ Imprint, Synthese, Neuroethics, and The Journal of Ethics. Zan Boag: To start with, could you explain a little bit about what deepfakes are, how the technology works, when it is used, and how advanced the technology currently is? Regina Rini: A…

Commentators in the British press are perpetually flummoxed by the way Boris Johnson’s popularity in the polls does not appear to suffer on account of his flagrant, compulsive, and easily disprovable lies. To them, the Prime Minister’s abiding appeal in the face of his mendacity is a conundrum that fails every test of moral probity. Ethically, and Kant was famously categorical in thinking so, isn’t all lying fundamentally wrong? And in any case, don’t liars always get their comeuppance – just like the naughty children in Hillaire Belloc’s and E. T. A. Hoffman’s cautionary tales? While I’d like nothing better than to see Boris Johnson run along London’s Downing Street with his pants on fire, part of me wants to tell these commentators to get over themselves. Lying has escaped…

Imagine you have been the victim of a terrible crime. Now, imagine that the perpetrators of that crime were powerful people – indeed, that they were the people who should have been protecting you and your family and friends. In this scenario, you probably have not been able to talk openly about what happened to you. For as long as the perpetrators remain in power, it’s simply too risky. But in your own lonely mind, where the powerful cannot (yet) penetrate, you hold out hope for justice. Many years later, the perpetrators have fallen from power. The new regime wishes to hold the perpetrators to account, and to draw a line in the sand – they want to show that the new regime will be nothing like the old. But…

O ME, man of slack faith so long! Standing aloof—denying portions so long; Only aware to-day of compact, all-diffused truth; Discovering to-day there is no lie, or form of lie, and can be none, but grows as inevitably upon itself as the truth does upon itself, Or as any law of the earth, or any natural production of the earth does. (This is curious, and may not be realised immediately —But it must be realised; I feel in myself that I represent falsehoods equally with the rest, And that the universe does.) Where has fail’d a perfect return, indifferent of lies or the truth? Is it upon the ground, or in water or fire? or in the spirit of man? or in the meat and blood? Meditating among liars, and…

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When the now notorious British nanny Louise Woodward was accused of shaking a baby to death in Newton, Massachusetts, she not only told the jury she was innocent; she turned to the polygraph to ‘prove’ it. In the late 1990s, eight-month-old Matthew Eappen died from injuries – including a fractured skull and internal bleeding – that seemed to indicate shaken baby syndrome. Woodward, then just 18 and Eappen’s au pair, was accused of murder. She subsequently passed the polygraph test, in which she insisted that she had not hurt the baby. However an expert witness in the case, social psychologist Leonard Saxe, a professor at Brandeis University, testified that the results were unreliable. While he could not – and still cannot – say what happened to Eappen (Woodward was later…

A coarse limestone mountain in western Iran bears a range of carvings in relief, among them a twenty-five metre tableau with inscriptions in three ancient languages. In 1835, a young British military officer was captivated by these inscriptions. He scaled a hundred metres up a cliff-face to try and copy them, knowing that if they were decoded they would be a cuneiform equivalent of the Rosetta stone. For centuries the intricate relief had been attributed to a host of sources, from a Babylonian queen to Christ and the apostles. But before the translation could be completed, the officer, Major Henry Rawlinson, was made political agent at Kandahar in the first Anglo-Afghan war. Bear with me here as I want to show something rather than tell it. If scientists drill ice…

Truth-telling is a virtue, isn’t it? That’s what we’re told. You should be an honest person, and honesty involves telling the truth when asked, not hiding things, not deceiving people. Immanuel Kant is infamous for taking this to the extreme, even to the point of demanding that we tell the truth when a potential murderer asks us where our friend is. For Kant, any lie would be an instance of treating someone else as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. It would be a failure to respect their humanity, the source of all their moral worth. Kant’s intuitions on not saving someone from a murder with a lie are bizarre and not widely shared. But, even with more mundane cases of lying, things aren’t exactly…

“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” — Walt Whitman “All men are born truthful, and die liars.” Marquis de Vauvenargues “When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies.” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138 “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.” William Cullen Bryant “In vino veritas.” Latin proverb “Questions don’t change the truth. But they give it motion.” Giannina Braschi “Truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries.” Aeschines “All Lies have a sentence of death written down against them.” Thomas Carlyle “You can’t handle the truth!” Colonel Jessup, A Few Good Men “Before all other things, man is distinguished by his pursuit and investigation of Truth.” Cicero “I never lie.” Superman “Truth can never be told so as…

Truth/truːθ/ noun: 1. The quality or state of being true; 2. That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality. Phrases · if truth be told; to tell the truth: to be frank (used especially when making an admission); · in truth: really; in fact; · of a truth: certainly; · the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: used to emphasise the absolute veracity of a statement; · truth in sentencing: the principle that a sentence given to a convicted person should be served in full. Origin:  Old English tr ī ewth, tr ē owth: ‘faithfulness, constancy’.…

Everyone admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.…

The Statesman Cicero 106 BCE – 43 BCE Pursuit and investigation Before all other things, man is distinguished by his pursuit and investigation of Truth. And hence, when free from needful business and cares, we delight to see, to hear, and to communicate, and consider a knowledge of many admirable and abstruse things necessary to the good conduct and happiness of our lives: whence it is clear that whatsoever is True, simple, and direct, the same is most congenial to our nature as men. Closely allied with this earnest longing to see and know the truth, is a kind of dignified and princely sentiment which forbids a mind, naturally well constituted, to submit its faculties to any but those who announce it in precept or in doctrine, or to…

Zan Boag: To start with, could you define truth and lies? It’s interesting that we tend to refer to truth in the singular and lies in plural. Timothy Levine: When I think of lies and deception, which I might not equate, I would tend to think of lies as a subcategory of deception. Deception is when I knowingly, intentionally, purposely mislead you. And one way I can go about doing that is through saying something that is demonstrably false, but I think there are probably lots of ways we could deceive people beyond saying false things, that we might not label lies, but they’re pretty clearly deception. If I would exploit false sarcasm, for example – I’d say something sarcastically that’s literally true, knowing that you will believe the opposite.…

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In recent years, universities have been caught in an ongoing technological arms race against their own students – or at least those who submit plagiarised assignments. As software has become more adept at catching students who copy from online sources or from other students’ work, the battlefront has shifted to ‘essay mills’ that proudly offer to write ‘plagiarism free’ bespoke assignments for a fee. Some universities are now making students type their assignments directly into online software that monitors typing style and speed to try to detect contract cheating. (One professor tells of a student being told,“This isn’t your own work,” and indignantly replying “That is my work, I paid for it!”) There is sometimes an air of farce about all this. Another professor reports receiving an essay that was…

The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had some very curious ideas about the body shapes of animals. To Schopenhauer, influenced by a mix of Kant, Plato, and classical Indian thought, the entire visible (‘phenomenal’) world of individual objects we see around us – everything from blades of grass to galaxies – is really just an illusion. What lies beneath and unifies this world of appearances is will. Not will for this or that, but simply will-as-such, a formless, insatiable craving for nothing-in-particular. In the phenomenal world, this underlying will expresses itself in the form of individual animals and plants all striving for life. While Schopenhauer had a fairly progressive concern for the welfare of animals, he also believed that only humans (and only a few of them) were capable…

Most Americans (71%) have heard of a conspiracy theory circulating widely online that alleges that powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak. And a quarter of US adults see at least some truth in it – including 5% who say it is definitely true and 20% who say it is probably true, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The share of Americans who see at least some truth to the theory differs by demographics and partisanship. Education: Educational attainment is an especially important factor when it comes to perceptions of the conspiracy theory. Around half of Americans with a high school diploma or less education (48%) say the theory is probably or definitely true, according to the survey. That compares with 38% of those who have completed some college…

One of the most salient feathers of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the…

Humans are both liars and truth-tellers. We have the endless capacity to reimagine and misrepresent the world, yet we are deeply interested in doing so accurately – and we are (mostly) in control of which one we do. How did we come to be this way? Lying isn’t the same thing as deception because, unlike deception, lying demands an intentional departure from truth. This makes lying rare in the animal kingdom. Insects can’t lie because, so far as we know, they don’t possess any notion of truth. But they can and do reap considerable advantage from deception. Camouflage is common among insects that are prey to other creatures, ranging from foliage-like colorations to the elaborate mimicry of leaves and twigs. Alternatively, plenty of insects indicate with strikingly bright colours that…

Black poet and scholar Audre Lorde said in her classic defence of anger – expressed in her famous essay The Uses of Anger – that it is loaded with information. Inspired by her work, feminist philosophers writing in the aftermath of her 1982 work have attempted to explore exactly how this is the case.They have come up with many answers too. They’ve discovered that anger helps us make sense of our world by revealing how morally wrong the world can be. Anger can give us information about how others view us as co-citizens – how seriously you take my anger can reveal my social standing in the community. If you are likely to discount or downplay my anger, then that can tell me that you do not perceive me as…

There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine. My other faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous. Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the necessary use of memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a great and powerful goddess), in my country, when they would say a man has no sense, they say, such a one has no memory; and when I complain of the defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as…

On Bullshit Harry Frankfurt So much bullshit One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognise bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. The Meaning of Truth William James Every crazy wind Beautiful is the flight…

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