Thursday, January 12, 2017
POST-TRUTH WORLDS A C GRAYLING BBC
Grayling wrote a short book on Wittgenstein which I read about 35 years ago now.
We have been in such a developing, or emerging, or perhaps better, long evolving, post-truth world for a very long time.
In some ways, it has been since the beginning, 450 BC; in others, only some hundreds of years.
What is called relativism is an old concept.
Most people have always been illiterate. Literacy itself is a relatively late phenomenon.
Hume set a certain skeptical floor.
Kant, patched together a halfway house.
Phenomenology, then, as it developed, was in a sense a marker for what we call the modern world.
Every age has thought of itself as the modern age.
Now it is called post modern; it is the same thing again later.
Quantum, another marker.
One point I would make, about Grayling's thesis, here, is that democracy itself, the ideology of democracy, is a great threat to truth, and not the other way around, not merely what is called a post-truth world. The post-truth world is quintessentially the world of democracy.
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