Two Relations between Thinking and Truth

The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: which one serves the other? The essay argues that a conception of philosophy as truth serving thought can be perceived in the work of French Nietzschean philosophers

Journal of Applied Philosophy , 2024

What is the relationship between theory and practice? The interplay between theory and practice is essential for translating abstract concepts into tangible realities. This connection is integral to embodying truth in our lives, showing that understanding alone is insufficient; the application truly confirms its significance. Nonetheless, contemporary philosophical discourse often leans towards intricate conceptual frameworks and cognitive insights, sidelining the integration of theory with practical wisdom. Many philosophers seem content with constructing elaborate theories devoid of a more profound philosophy that might guide their own way of life. The book Practices of Truth in Philosophy: Historical and Comparative Perspectives serves as an asset for translating philosophical thought into living reality. The book explores the practical frameworks of William James, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Friedrich Nietzsche, aiming to transform truth-telling into a meaningful endeavor. It also delves deeper into exploring traditional, geographical, and historical perspectives rooted in living reality. The consistent emphasis of this volume is on connecting rich philosophical insights into truth with practice. The editors are concerned with a recent trend in philosophy, noting that it has historically prioritized theoretical aspects over the practical application of philosophical thought regarding truth. However, unlike the present philosophies, the approaches developed by the contributors are not concerned with the question of theory, but rather, the question of practice (p. 1). In other words, individuals should not merely understand the philosophical concept but must actively integrate and adapt it into a distinct way of living (p. 42). The core goal of the book is to make meaningful ways to demonstrate a way of living through the philosophy of life. The book is divided into 15 chapters and has diversified approaches to engaging truthtelling with the way of life. The contributors are not limited to the praxis of the truth; instead, this book's essential concern is how one gets this practice of truth. Sandra Shapshay argues, 'The key for Schopenhauer in attaining truths through these aesthetic and moral avenues, and what fundamentally unites these two avenues, is the practice of stepping out of one's habitual egoism' (p. 138). In other words, to cultivate goodness and aesthetic contemplation, one needs to step out of self-centeredness, which harms the world. In this case, the embodied truth praxes attain the theory after having the practicality of truth. Pietro Gori's engagement with the practicality of truth, approaching the work of James, Foucault, and Nietzsche, declares that philosophical insights relate to us to make true and give meanings to them. As a result, these insights are not static but rather active for practical engagement (p. 176).

Pascal Zambito and Shunichi Takagi eds., Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. New York: Routledge

Wittgenstein compares his attempt to teach a ‘new movement of thought’ with Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of values, and connects his conception that philosophy should be written as poetry with Nietzsche’s approach to philosophy. This chapter develops an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks in light of his rejection of philosophical or metaphysical theses in the sense of true/false propositions regarding universal/exceptionless essential necessities. Whilst philosophical accounts can on Wittgenstein’s view be true, truth in philosophy, as in poetry, isn’t to be understood in terms of the truth of propositions, regardless of whether the truths in question are contingent or necessary. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s conception of truth in philosophy can help to understand what Nietzsche may have had in mind by questioning the value of truth and by proposing a re-evaluation of philosophers’ will to truth. On this account Wittgenstein emerges as one of the non-dogmatic future philosophers, whose arrival Nietzsche predicts. I conclude by outlining how Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals can be seen, not as a poorly justified piece of empirical history, but as an instance of philosophical poetry in Wittgenstein’s sense. On this interpretation, Nietzsche articulates an account of morality by proposing a novel picture (a mode of representing or envisaging) its genealogy. By putting forward this possibility he is able to question widely held assumptions about the systematicity of morality, whilst the justification and truth of Nietzsche’s alternative account is judged on the basis of its clarificatory capacity in accordance with how Wittgenstein conceives of the justification and truth of philosophical accounts. Nietzsche’s approach in Genealogy can also be usefully compared with Wittgensteinian natural history, understood as a special case of philosophical methodology.

2023

This volume provides a geographically and historically diverse overview of philosophical traditions that establish a deep connection between truth and practice, or even see truth itself as a kind of practice. Under the label “practices of truth” are subsumed disparate approaches that can be fruitfully brought together to explore the intersections between truth and practice in philosophy as well as to address a range of intriguing questions about truth that fall outside the domain of pure theory. The chapters in this volume provide a variety of perspectives on key practices of truth in philosophy and in the history of philosophy, enriching our understanding of the different ways in which truth and practice may be connected, including the role of certain practices in enabling philosophical insight into truth, the ways in which truth may actually be embedded in some practices, and the impact of truth on practice. Practices of Truth in Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in the history of philosophy, comparative philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the metaphysics of truth.

Philosophia 41 (2013), 1079-1094., 2013

Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all.

As a result of his critique of the pretentions of knowledge, the 18th Century German philosophy Immanuel Kant showed that the metaphysical ideas of God and the substantial soul are beyond the scope of any possible theoretical knowledge but necessarily be postulated by the practical (i.e. moral) reason of any rational being. In other words, even though we cannot know whether God and a substantial soul exist, we must posit their existence because of our rationally based ethical commitments. In this presentation, I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche takes Kant’s insight about the need to postulate certain truths on the basis of our ethical/practical commitments and concludes that philosophy’s task in general, whether the philosopher is conscious of it or not, is to create ideas that serve practical, rather than theoretical, interests. The goal of our theoretical interests, what Nietzsche collectively calls the will to truth, are limited by his perspectival critique of knowledge, leaving our practical interests to shape the world with which we have cognitive contact, the world as it is from our idiosyncratic perspective. Unlike Kant who held that practical reason gives the will a categorical imperative, i.e. an imperative that applies universally and unconditionally, the dictates of our practical interest are neither necessary/unconditional nor universal. Rather, they are contingent on the type of person one is, which for Nietzsche is determined by the complex of various drives and passions that constitute the body. Given the contingency of the dictates of our practical interest, the way we cognize the world on the basis of that interest will differ depending on the particular set of drives and passions an individual embodies. Philosophy’s task is to create ways of conceptualizing the world that promote a particular kind of life, one that allows an individual, given their “type,” to flourish. This is in contrast to the traditional view of philosophy’s task, which conceives of the philosopher as searching for and perhaps attaining eternal, absolute truths about reality as it is in itself, i.e. apart from any particular, limited perspective on it. With the focus of philosophy on cognizing the world in such a way so that a certain type can flourish, allowing the individual to fully affirm his or her own existence and because of this Nietzsche believes that it is able to overcome the nihilistic will to truth that has characterized philosophy to date and thereby will be the philosophy of the future.

Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, ed. by Adrian Johnston, Boštjan Nedoh, and Alenka Zupančič (Edinburgh U. Press, 2021), pp. 165-82., 2021

THIS CHAPTER IS part of a larger sequence, one aim of which is to articulate a bit what can still be said, in truth, about the 'being' of a subject-if one can be said to have any-within the scope of a formal approach to truth as having the structure of language. 1 It is a familiar point of the doxography of the twentieth century that such an approach, as taken for example by analytic philosophy after the 'linguistic turn', destabilises the psychological subject of thought and experience by displacing it from any constitutive position, either with respect to objects or meanings. What remains less well-marked is what results from this displacement with respect to the position from which these-objects and meanings-take their place in language and from which can then be articulated the knowledge of them that the structure of a language, as spoken, permits. I shall have recourse to the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, as well as the late seminars of Lacan, because of the way both locate this positional question in relation to the totality of what that structure allows to be articulated as known. I will be interested, especially, in the particular kind of complex organisation that both give to the structural field of what can be said, according to their own methods, and in the correlative kind of unity that this allows to be inferred in the position from which this articulation can be enunciated. This unity, I will argue, can be seen as having its point in the application it permits-an application that might, as I shall suggest, be called 'ethical'-to what speaks in the life of a speaking being, in default of agency, ego and consciousness, and in abeyance of the identity of thinking and being that these presume as their metaphysical guarantee. That the identity of thinking and being is here in abeyance means, as I shall suggest, that if the 'subject' or 'I' can indeed be specified as a 'linguistic' or 'grammatical' fiction, it is nevertheless not a 'subjective' being as opposed to an 'objective' one, but (as one that locates itself in being with respect to what can be

Teoría electromagnética séptima edicion, 2006

William Hart Hayt Carlos Roberto Cordero Pedraza John A. Buck Teoría electromagnética McGraw Hill (2006)