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BERNARD WILLIAMS, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002. Pp. xi + 328.
Bernard Williams' last book is the most interesting set of reflections on the values of truth and truth-telling in living memory. Its grasp of philosophical arguments is astonishing. In many cases it is rightly speedy: Three lines to set up an argument, two to demolish it, three to revive it, a total of perhaps thirty lines to set the whole matter to rights. The book manages to be both learned and passionate without being pretentious. And of course witty; some will mutter, 'too clever by half.' Laughter can usefully accompany the gravest matters, and sometimes an aphorism can express your thought better than a disquisition. One example with which Williams concurs: 'the famous and deep joke ascribed to Sydney Morganbesser: "Of course pragmatism is true; the trouble is that it does not work'" (285, n.14).
Williams' analytic expertise is combined with an acute sensibility to historical facts, or claims to fact, about the history of practices of telling the truth about the past, or about oneself. He writes about what Western civilizations do and have done in trying to find out and to tell the truth. The book presents what are argued to be human universals about the values of truth, as opposed to the historical circumstances in which particular ways of finding out come into being.
The book is both timeless and timely. It was prompted in part by the Western (largely but by no means exclusively American) malaise about truth itself, represented by the quite recent but now faded and jaded events called the culture wars. Williams begins with a contemporary tension involving truth and truthfulness. We have become sceptical about much of what we are told in our public lives, and in the histories that we read. The more multicultural or post-colonial that we become, the more many of us query the confidence of an earlier era. There was too much outright lying, and even more distortion of the past to suit the ideologies of our parents (or our oppressors, depending on who 'we' are). We cry out for a truthfulness that we do not encounter. And then we doubt that there is such...