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362 Pages·2014·1.95 MB·English
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TRUTH MATTERS This page intentionally left blank preface iii Truth Matters Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion EDITED BY Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca iv preface © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 isbn978-0-7735-4270-9(cloth) isbn978-0-7735-8997-1(epdf) isbn978-0-7735-8998-8(epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. The publication of this book is supported by generous grants from the icsCentre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, the Calvin Centre for Christian Scholarship, and the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Truth matters : knowledge, politics, ethics, religion / edited by Lam- bert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker. Based on a conference held at the University of Toronto in August 2010. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn978-0-7735-4270-9(bound).– isbn978-0-7735-8997-1(epdf).– isbn978-0-7735-8998-8(epub) 1. Truth. I. Zuidervaart, Lambert, author, writer of preface, editor of compilation II. Carr, Allyson, writer of introduction, editor of compi- lation III. Klaassen, Matthew, writer of introduction, editor of compila- tion IV. Shuker, Ronnie, editor of compilation bd171.t82 2013 121 c2013-906770-1 c2013-906771-x This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13Sabon preface v Contents Preface Lambert Zuidervaart vii Introduction Allyson Carr and Matthew J. Klaassen 3 PART ONE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 1 How Not to Be an Anti-realist: Habermas, Truth, and Justification Lambert Zuidervaart 23 2 Radical Constructivism, Education, and Truth as Life-Giving Disclosure Clarence W. Joldersma 46 3 The Jelly and the Shot: Laying down the Law for Pragmatism in Quantum Physics Matthew Walhout 66 4 Cognitive Diversity, Conceptual Schemes, and Truth Olaf Ellefson 83 PART TWO TRUTH AND POLITICS 5 Exposure and Disclosure: The Risk of Hermeneutical Truth in Democratic Politics Darren R. Walhof 103 6 Truthfulness, Discourse, and the Problem of Pluralism Adam Smith 122 vi Contents 7 A Comparative Ethics Approach to the Concept of Bearing Witness: A Practice in Christian Theology and Journalism Amy D. Richards 138 8 Narrative Truth in Canadian Historical Fiction: In between Veracity and Imagination John Van Rys 155 PART THREE TRUTH AND ETHICS 9 Truth, Truthfulness, and the I-Self Relationship Gerrit Glas 175 10 Does Truth Matter to Ethics? Kierkegaard, Ethics, and the Subjectivity of Truth Jay A. Gupta 195 11 Theories of Concepts and Moral Truth John J. Park 211 12 Educating for Truthfulness Doug Blomberg 225 PART FOUR TRUTH AND RELIGION 13 Truth Unveiled: Balthasar and the Contemplation of Christian Truth Gill K. Goulding 245 14 Truth as “Being Trued”: Intersections between Ontological Truth in Aquinas and the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion Pamela J. Reeve 263 15 Bedevilling Truth: “What Have I to Do with Thee?” Jeffrey Dudiak 283 16 A Concept of Artistic Truth Prompted by Biblical Wisdom Literature Calvin Seerveld 296 Bibliography 313 Contributors 339 Index 345 preface vii Preface This book arises from Truth Matters, an interdisciplinary and inter- national conference held at the University of Toronto in August 2010. The conference program spells out our motivation: We live in an age of skepticism about the idea of truth. Contem- porary skeptics question the nature and value of truth and the concomitant virtue of truthfulness. Skepticism about truth is not restricted to popular culture. It occurs within the academic world, where deflationists have argued that the idea of truth is not a sub- stantive notion and some poststructuralists have portrayed it as primarily the scene of struggles for power. Such skepticism is sur- prising, for truth and truthfulness have been central to Western civilization and the academic enterprise. Given both contempo- rary skepticism and the centrality of truth, the conference organiz- ers believe it is time to reconceptualize truth and to reclaim truth- fulness for the academic enterprise. Other motivations lie behind the conference and this book. Both intend to expand the scope of work on truth at the Institute for Chris- tian Studies (ics), which hosted the Truth Matters conference. Both aim to continue an animated dialogue about faith and scholarship among the conference’s co-sponsors. Both also help launch a new ven- ture at icscalled the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics (cprse). ics is an independent graduate school for interdisciplinary philos- ophy affiliated with the Toronto School of Theology (tst) at the Uni- versity of Toronto. Each year ics’s master’s and phd students take an viii Preface interdisciplinary seminar co-taught by ics’s faculty members. In the two years preceding the Truth Matters conference, these seminars studied the topic of truth: first truth in contemporary thought and then truth in the history of Western thought. The seminars asked whether a new approach to thinking about truth is needed and what such an approach would look like. ics envisioned the Truth Matters conference as an occasion to welcome a wider range of disciplines and scholars into this discussion. This book has a similar aim. icswas founded in the 1960s by a dedicated group of Dutch immi- grants who wished to establish a North American university in the Reformed tradition along the lines of the Vrije Universiteit, now known as the vuUniversity Amsterdam (or vufor short). Most of ics’s founding faculty received their doctorates at vu, where they appren- ticed in the “reformational” tradition of philosophy established by legal theorist Herman Dooyeweerd and philosopher Dirk Vollen- hoven. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven regarded philosophy as an inter- disciplinary enterprise whose insights should contribute to the trans- formation of culture and society, and they insisted that education and scholarship are not religiously neutral. From its beginnings, ics has been inspired by this reformational vision, at the heart of which lies a dynamic conception of truth. Several chapters in this volume offer glimpses into what a reformational conception of truth might imply. As a faculty member at ics, the director of the Truth Matters con- ference, and the senior editor of this book, I have a personal stake in working out such a conception. Indeed, that is my current research project, and it has received impetus from ics’s interdisciplinary semi- nars, from the conference, and from essays such as those by Joldersma and Glas in this volume that take up my first attempts to offer a new and comprehensive conception of truth. I wish to acknowledge with thanks these generative contributions. ics’s partners in putting on the Truth Matters conference included not only vu but also Calvin College and Dordt College in the United States. These four schools share an ethnic and religious heritage that stems from a neo-Calvinian social movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led by the Dutch educator, journalist, politician, and religious leader Abraham Kuyper. The Kuyperian move- ment has inspired two traditions of thought in North America: the reformational tradition, already mentioned, and Reformed epistemolo- gy, which is associated with such prominent analytic philosophers as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Since the early 1980s, ics, Preface ix vu, Calvin, and Dordt have co-sponsored several “quadrilateral” confer- ences to promote dialogue among their faculties on issues of faith, life, and scholarship. Given both the religious affinities and intellectual dif- ferences between reformational philosophy and Reformed epistemolo- gy, it is not surprising that the first of these conferences, held at ics in 1981, brought together scholars from both traditions, as well as from a Scots Presbyterian background, to examine “Rationality in the Calvin- ian Tradition.”1 Subsequent quadrilateral conferences have examined the role of worldviews in the social sciences (Calvin College, 1985), ten- sions between universal norms and particular contexts (vu, 1987), con- troversies concerning traditional conceptions of creation order (ics, 1992), the role of the arts in a democratic society (Calvin College, 1995), and different ways of knowing (Dordt College, 1998).2 Always in the background of these conferences, and sometimes explicitly in the fore- ground, were questions of truth: What is truth, and why does it matter? The most recent quadrilateral conference, in 2010, made these ques- tions a central topic. The Truth Matters conference would not have happened without substantial funding from ics, Calvin College, Dordt College, and vu. Moreover, icsand Calvin College have provided publication subsidies for this book via ics’s Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, directed by Ronald Kuipers, and the Calvin Center for Christ- ian Scholarship, directed by Susan Felch. The editors, all of whom helped organize the original conference, are very grateful for this institutional support. I also wish to mention with gratitude the gen- erous grants the conference and this book have received from the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust. The publication of Truth Matters is among the first fruits of ics’s new research centre. Founded shortly before the Truth Matters con- ference took place in 2010, cprse promotes philosophically primed and religiously attuned interdisciplinary research on leading ques- tions of life and society. It has done so to date by establishing a new Toronto Interfaculty Colloquium for cross-disciplinary discussion and debate among faculty members at ics, tst, the University of Toronto, and other schools; hosting public seminars on monographs authored by icsfaculty members and graduates; and organizing cross- sectoral conferences for academics, professionals, and the wider pub- lic,such as Social Justice and Human Rights (Toronto, 2012) and an upcoming conference on Economic Justice (Edmonton, May 2014). Truth Matters is the first book to emerge from cprse’s work. Specifi-

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Why should we seek and tell the truth? Does anyone know what truth is? Many are skeptical about the relevance of truth. Truth Matters endeavours to show why truth is important in a world where the very idea of truth is contested. Putting philosophers in conversation with educators, literary scholars
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