Why Truth Matters

"'In this book, Benson and Stangroom are wide-ranging in their knowledge and in the thinking about what they know, and so the books appears laid out almost like a collection of essays that are connected by the theme described above. Anthropology, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, feminism, philosophies of various sorts, and the politics of Nazism are all touched on or addressed. Each chapter is interesting in its own right.... The book is beautifully written, and sprinkled with passages of both insight and literary value.' Entelechy: Mind and Culture 'British philosophers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom array their immense talent... in Why Truth Matters. What they're on about is a prevailing intellectual indifference to coherence, logic, rationality, and evidence. It's a world-view that holds that there is no historical truth and almost everything is a mere social construction. Discovery is conflated with invention, myth is elevated alongside empirical evidence, and no lines are drawn between fact and fiction....Most of us will get the main point Stangroom and Benson are making: truth matters because human beings are the only species capable of finding it out.' Straight.com, July 13, 2006 'As polemics go, it is short and adequately pugnacious. Yet the authors do not paint their target with too broad a brush. At heart, they are old-fashioned logical empiricists - or, perhaps, followers of Samuel Johnson, who, upon hearing of Bishop Berkeley's contention that the objective world does not exist, refuted the argument by kicking a rock. Still, Benson and Stangroom do recognize that there are numerous varieties of contemporary suspicion regarding the concept of truth....They bend over backwards in search of every plausible good intention behind postmodern epistemic skepticism. And then they kick the rock.' Inside Higher Ed, June 2006"

Jeremy Stangroom is co-editor (with Julian Baggini) of The Philosophers' Magazine and the successful philosophy books, What Philosophers Think and Great Thinkers A-Z. He and Ophelia Benson are editors of www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

1. The Antinomies of Truth; 2. Truth, Doubt and the Philosophers; 3. The Truth Radicals; 4. The Social Construction of Truth; 5. Politics, Ideology and Evolutionary Biology; 6. Wishful Thinking and Epistemological Confusion; 7. Institutions, Academe and Truth; 8. Why Truth Matters.