your senses then you have to trust, no wrong, they can look up,
If your mind will get you awake.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Nothing is more controversial than the concept of truth. All sorts of groups claiming it for himself. Mutual suspicion and rejection of the other (up to extinction) are the result. Therefore, the criticism seems prima facie evident that claims (with claims to truth) that the term havoc truth more harm than good. But once we really do without this concept? Simon Blackburn, a philosopher at Cambridge feels, in his book "Truth - A Guide for the Perplexed," this term refers to the tooth. He is trying to explore the content and meaning and the changes that has seen the concept over time to trace.
It follows the finding that the present philosophy is always helpful. This is especially true for contemporary philosophy. Still trying to Blackburn, the arguments and ideas of the "relativist" and "postmodernists" understand. For only if these trends are understood, they can also be somewhat opposed. For it is certainly not indifferent to what is believed to be true or what men and women think. The risk is very aptly characterized by the following sentence: The world is an equally valid, if everything is valid. Ultimately, it is
the importance of our thoughts and speech and subsequent actions. And actions create facts - proclaimed as the word of course. Was the earlier skepticism a complete abstinence from judgments, born of the insight into the Imperfections and subjectivity of their own world view and fear of dogmatism, is the modern counterpart to degenerate into a recognition of all the conflicting opinions. The result is a blossoming of unfounded doctrines without backing in every possible direction: Prophecy, Astrology, Voodoo, geomancy, dowsing, homeopathy, miracles, angels, occult, satanism, aliens, creationism, management strategies, psychotherapy, healing stones and many other dogmatism.
Blackburn sees this development as a threat to the world, although the arguments of the post-modern relativists sometimes acknowledges. The opposite - an undisguised absolutism - is he is also suspicious. But where is the golden mean? The possession of truth is one thing, the essence of truth, however, very different. Finally comes
Blackburn to the conclusion that both sides have suffered no major victories. The project of "first philosophy" - a all this to legitimacy - is in any case exposed as illusion. We can not step out of the world, and consider it objectively from the outside. But this means that knowledge is impossible? His answer is no. Once a scientific problem only the problem itself is, relativism appears only as an unnecessary distraction. Therefore, we should readily and, all of science-based theories of inspiration, despite all reservations and provisional.
Simon Blackburn: Truth - A Guide for skeptics. Translated from English by Andrew Hetzel. Scientific Book Company (Primus Verlag), Darmstadt 2005th
