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Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed [Paperback]

Simon Blackburn
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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Book Description

25 May 2006
This important book is about truth, and the enemies of truth, and the wars that are fought between them. As Simon Blackburn says in his introduction, "the ground is complicated, strewn with abandoned fortresses and trenches, fought over by shifting alliances". Truth is an essential sure-footed guide through the territory, from classical to modern times. It looks at relativism and absolutism, toleration and belief, objectivity and knowledge, science and pseudo-science, and the moral and political implications, as well as the nuances, of all these.

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Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed + Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics + Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (25 May 2006)
  • Language: Unknown
  • ISBN-10: 0141014253
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141014258
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.6 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 18,948 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

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Product Description

About the Author

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and one of the most widely respected philosophers of our time. He is the author of many influential books, including the best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994), Think (1999) and Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (2001). He edited the prestigious philosophy journal MIND from 1984 to 1990. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a frequent contributor to New Republic, and to discussion programmes on Radio 4 in the UK, and reviews for The Independent and The Sunday Times.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
In the Introduction I mentioned that for classical sceptics, a dearth of arguments, or a clash of countervailing arguments, led to peaceful suspension of belief, whereas in our own times it is seen more as a licence for people to believe what they like. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Only what is true explains what happens 31 Mar 2009
By Sphex TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
Alone it stands, assailed on all sides by priests and postmodernists and prophets and pseudoscientists and practitioners of public relations, how are we ever going to approach a word like "truth" in its solitary majesty? With a philosopher like Simon Blackburn at your side, and with this brilliant book in your hand. The difference between him and them is the degree of commitment to reason, the degree to which obfuscation is avoided and the temptation to hide behind jargon is resisted. Blackburn could easily dazzle most of us with technical arguments, but he wants to clarify, not mystify, and he succeeds. This book is about a "war of ideas and attitudes... not only between different people, but grumbling within the breast of each individual": today, are we a believer, a sceptic, a cynic, a rationalist, an absolutist, a relativist? And tomorrow? Many of us will sensibly shrug off such labels, but we should not and we do not shrug off questions about truth: it matters if "politicians claim that some country has weapons of mass destruction when they know that it does not, or if NASA says that a shuttle is safe" when it is not.

Chapter 1 - "Faith, Belief and Reason" - draws in three more similarly abused and important terms. While this might seem to be multiplying our difficulties before we have begun, these are all connected and their meanings interdependent. People either give reasons for or have faith in the truth of any particular belief. That sounds simple, inclusive and nicely symmetrical, and surely covers all bases. The harmony is an illusion. The absolutist, often of a religious temperament, cannot resist the allure of dogma, while relativism "chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says." Both sides bicker over questions of authority. Blackburn's opening sentences hold out the promise of finding a way through this maze: "There are real standards... We must not believe that anything goes."

Indeed, we "have a duty to believe carefully, in the light of reason alone" as the following story illustrates. A shipowner who acquires "a sincere and comfortable conviction" that his vessel is thoroughly safe and seaworthy, and who ignores any doubts to the contrary, is putting his trust in a higher power and putting his passengers at risk when he allows the vessel to sail. His belief in the safety of his ship has not been earned "in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts."

This is from the essay "The Ethics of Belief" by William Clifford, who argues that it is always morally wrong to take an intellectual shortcut and believe on faith alone. Blackburn agrees. Someone "sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another" (transubstantiation, a process still believed to fuel the Eucharist) "although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them." Lack of faith is not a deficiency, and a refusal "to believe something is not a kind of faith." I would argue in addition that a lifetime of exposure to such false beliefs corrodes our powers of critical thought. How else to explain Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's recent assertion that secularists are not "fully human"?

"Making ourselves gullible or credulous, we lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them" and risk "sinking back into savagery". Children, who are naturally open to all sorts of beliefs and have their lives before them, must therefore be protected from their own credulity just as we protect them from running into the road. An important first step is to recognize that children "are born human beings, but nothing else."

Blackburn has a wonderful way of bringing a discussion about truth down to earth and can write the kind of sentence you're unlikely to find elsewhere: "we do not have to resort to dark forces to explain my status as an announcer of butter". He believes there is butter in the fridge because he has opened the door and seen it. What's more, since the age of around four, when we ceased to be self-centred realists, we have all known that it is possible for others to hold a false belief about there being butter in the fridge - if we have eaten it and not owned up! This appreciation of truth is not metaphysical speculation but an ordinary part of being a functioning human being. No one is "born a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Jew" but we are all born with the potential to work out what is true and what is not true without recourse to supposed higher powers. A just and humane society must nurture and not extinguish such potential.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars An engaging guide to an age-old controversy 31 Mar 2010
By Melmoth
Format:Paperback
An engagingly-written guide to the battle between realists and relativists that has raged since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Blackburn's mission is to remove the "sneer quotes" placed around "truth" by relativists and pragmatists, whilst admitting the flaws in the realist position. The quest for truth, he believes, is a worthwhile one: even if we cannot prove that our truth corresponds to the world out there, we can say that the quest for it gives us answers that work.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Read 4 Nov 2009
Format:Paperback
Lucid, thought provoking treatise. A good start for those seeking truth, rather than those who have their 'truths' provided for them by some form of superstition.
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