Dick Rorty reviews Bernard Williams' new book, Truth and Truthfulness

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'Spinozist' used to be what 'Postmodernist' is now, the worst thing one intellectual could call another. For reasons explained in Jonathan Israel's fascinating The Radical Enlightenment,* there was, in 1680, a simple litmus test for intellectual and moral responsibility. You failed this test if you believed, as Spinoza did, that motion is intrinsic to matter, for that would imply that God didn't have to give it a nudge. From there it is a short step to Spinoza's conclusion that 'God's decrees and commandments, and consequently God's Providence are, in truth, nothing but Nature's order.'

In those days, if you defended the absurdly counter-intuitive claim that matter could move all by itself, it was clear you could hardly be expected to have any moral scruples or intellectual conscience. You were frivolously dissolving the social glue that held Christendom together. You represented the same sort of danger to moral and intellectual virtue as Arians had posed, in the days of St Augustine, by arguing that although Christ was certainly of a similar substance to the Father, he could hardly be the same substance.

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I especially liked the way he drew a parallel between the correspondence theory of truth and religion, and between the coherence theory and post-modernism and lack of religion.

Something Tommy_Paine might want to look at.

[ November 08, 2002: Message edited by: Michelle ]

Moving on, though... Has anybody read Alain Badiou? In the chapter titled 'The Politics of Truth' Zizek (in Ticklish Subject) describes Badiou's attempts to rehabilitate the notion of Truth in radical politics. It's quite interesting, and it goes a step beyond the standard epistemological debates around the politics of truth, post-Foucault era.