Criterion of Truth and Common Beliefs: Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians 1 (M 7)

Editorial

These stanzas from a hymn attributed to Nâgârjuna reflect a problem recognized in many Buddhist attempts to express the truth. The problem basically is how to use language to release human beings from their attachment to deceptive (false) mental and emotional habits. The Buddha and his followers claimed they could provide a path, a means, of release from life's anxieties and frustrations. This meant that the Buddhist teach ers (therapists) had to entice their hearers into trying the Buddha's remedy, but without diluting its cathartic power to the point where it became simply a narcotic or worse, a poison. Thus, in expressing the truth (dharma) the spiritual teachers recognized, on the one hand, that the truth which illumines must be appropriate to the spiritual condition of the hearer, and on the other, that there is a criterion of truth which distinguishes salutary teachings from perversions. One way of explaining how there could be a variety of truth statements some appearing to be mutually contradictory while also affirming that there was a criterion of truth which applied to all truth claims was to assert that there were two kinds of truth: conventional or world-ensconced truth (samvrti-satya), and ultimate or highest truth (jparamartha-satya). While this distinction solved some problems in relating different Bud dhist statements, it raised new questions at another level of explanation. For instance, if there are two kinds of truth, what is the relationship between them? Are these kinds of truth simply two kinds of statements having their own linguistic (i.e. logical) structures that apply to different realms of discourse (as in the difference between metaphorical and ana

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I discuss an alternative to information literacy and technical fixes for fake news and other such misleading information: the education and self‐interrogation of the subject who needs information. Information has many different forms, types of truth claims and criteria for truth. Much of our daily information intake has nothing to do with true or untrue knowledge, but rather, involves tastes and opinions. If we confuse the conditions for public or learned knowledge with these, or even if we do not recognize how such knowledge also has its own institutional senses of taste, we will mislead ourselves based on false assumptions about what it is that different documents can inform us of. The subject‐of‐(information)‐need, or the “user,” is the bedrock notion of the subject in information retrieval, but it is constructed by the information environment it finds itself within. If the user cannot judge this environment before using it, then information literacy cannot be of enough help.

In this paper, I draw upon recent commentary on Kierkegaard’s existential religious philosophy in order to clarify some key aspects of the idea of authenticity. Interpretations of Kierkegaard’s work in this area highlight the importance of truth considered subjectively rather than objectively, while emphasising the critical role of faith in understanding the truth for an individual subject. However, there remains some dispute about the importance of the objective referent in subjective truth claims and affirmations of faith. Considering how objective uncertainty forms an integral part of faith for Kierkegaard, I argue against the importance of an objective referent for subjective truth, as relations of faith hold despite– and indeed, partly because of– their underlying objective uncertainty. The objective truth of one’s subjective truth claims is, in other words, not a necessary criterion for truth as subjectivity for Kierkegaard. From this, I draw a connection to the centrality of genuine doubt in the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Peirce, in order to construct and defend a model of authenticity that emphasises a receptiveness to genuine doubt at its core.

This book reconstructs the Stoic doctrine of prolepsis. Prolepses are conceptions that develop naturally from ordinary experience. They are often identified with preconceptions (i.e. the first conceptions one unconsciously forms of something). However, this is inconsistent with the Stoics’ claim that prolepseis are criteria of truth. Rather, prolepseis are analytically true claims embedded within one’s ordinary conceptual scheme (e.g. the good is beneficial). When they have been articulated and systematized, prolepseis can be used to judge conceptual claims that go beyond the scope of sense-perceptual knowledge (e.g. pleasure is the good). The Stoics often refer to prolepseis as “common conceptions” to emphasize that they are shared by everyone, although in most people they remain unarticulated. This reconstruction suggests that Chrysippus was influenced by Platonic recollection to a greater extent than previously recognized. It supports the orthodoxy of Epictetus’ statements about prolepsis and suggests that later authors who assimilate the Epicurean and Stoic doctrines were misled by the polemical attacks of Carneades. The argument of the book is supported by a comprehensive collection of fragments relating to prolepsis in Epicurus, the early Stoa, Cicero, Epictetus, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Alexander of Aphrodisias.

Descrevem-se aqui as teorias tradicionais de verdade, desde aquela por correspondência até a por consenso. O construtivismo é então apresentado como alternativa para as ciências humanas, que apresentam um caráter emancipatório, e isto entra na composição de seu conceito de verdade. No caso da religião, a verdade é mais experiencial, mas a teologia precisa seguir os critérios de verdade das demais ciências. Assim, a crítica dos neo-ateus não se sustenta, pois abordam a religião só em seu conteúdo cognitivo. Eles têm sua razão, no entanto, dada a propensão humana ao engano e ao autoengano (ilusão), os quais, no entanto, se referem a todas as esferas de conhecimento. A teologia também tem de se questionar sobre que tipo de evidências empíricas dispõe para embasar suas afirmações. A pluralidade religiosa (e, portanto, de reivindicações de verdade) surge como problema, mas o entendimento das raízes comuns da religião, fornecido pelas ciências evolutivas, fornece uma base importante para se lidar com o problema. Em resumo, o que se apresenta aqui é um esboço de defesa do realismo em teologia.

This essay examines the American glaciologist M Jackson’s While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change and The Secret Lives of Glaciers; the British glaciologist Jemma Wadham’s Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity; and the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water, all of which employ autobiographical discourse to convey the enormity of the climate crisis as it is manifested in the rapidly accelerating loss of Earth’s glacial ice. I discuss these writers’ accounts of their turn to life writing to augment the limited persuasive force scientific data, their scaling of the temporality of glacier recession to the time spans of their own lives, their attribution of sentience to glaciers through an engagement with non-Anglo-European worldviews, and their expressions of grief at the impending death of Earth’s glaciers. I suggest that these texts demonstrate how the distinctive truth claims, temporal modalities, subject-positioning strategies, and affective appeals of life narrative provide a particularly supple hermeneutic schema in which an understanding of the moral ramifications of humans’ mutually dependent relationships with more-than-human nature - what Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru have described as ‘a planetary ethics of relationality’ - might be fostered.