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À l'orée de leur histoire, la philosophie et la psychanalyse ont rencontré toutes les deux la question de la vérité. La République de Platon présente le monde où s'agitent les hommes comme un théâtre d'ombres, offert en spectacle à des prisonniers enchaînés dans une caverne, coupés à jamais de la lumière de la vérité, conception que Nietzsche reprend, vingt-cinq siècles plus tard, en avançant que ce n'est que pour « vivre avec quelque repos » que l'homme maintient « la croyance invincible que ce soleil, cette fenêtre, cette table, est une vérité en soi ». Après avoir cru un moment que l'analyse des symptômes et des rêves était susceptible de restituer au sujet la vérité de son histoire durant la cure, Freud dut reconnaître la vanité de cet espoir en constatant « [qu'il] n'existe dans l'inconscient aucun indice de réalité de telle sorte qu'il est impossible de distinguer l'une de l'autre la vérité et la fiction investie d'affect ». Conclusion qui fit dire à Lacan, tirant son ultime conséquence, « [que] nous ne rêvons pas seulement quand nous dormons ». Sur le principe que la passion de la vérité a toujours rendu fous ceux qui prétendaient détenir le sens du monde (Hitler comme Schreber nous apportent ici leur témoignage), la philosophie et la psychanalyse ont, chacune dans leur champ, subverti le statut de la vérité en découvrant d'elle un nouveau visage : celui d'une vérité pure et sans contenu, solidaire d'un homme sans qualité référé au « signe privé de sens », évoqué par Hölderlin, en écho anticipé au signifiant primordial, identifié par Lacan, auquel l'analysant à la fin de sa cure est appelé à s'assujettir. Dans un monde fragmenté en convictions et en certitudes par les intégrismes politiques et religieux, il devient urgent de rétablir les droits d'une vérité vide soumise au primat de la pensée. À la croisée des chemins de la philosophie et de la psychanalyse, c'est ce chantier qu'ont ouvert dans un débat sans concessions les contributeurs de ce livre.

Truth.

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The author of the highly popular book Think, which Time magazine hailed as "the one book every smart person should read to understand, and even enjoy, the key questions of philosophy," Simon Blackburn is that rara avis-an eminent thinker who is able to explain philosophy to the general reader. Now Blackburn offers a tour de force exploration of what he calls "the most exciting and engaging issue in the whole of philosophy"-the age-old war over truth. The front lines of this war are well defined. On one side are those who believe in plain, unvarnished facts, rock-solid truths that can be found through reason and objectivity-that science leads to truth, for instance. Their opponents mock this idea. They see the dark forces of language, culture, power, gender, class, ideology and desire-all subverting our perceptions of the world, and clouding our judgement with false notions of absolute truth. Beginning with an early skirmish in the war-when Socrates confronted the sophists in ancient Athens-Blackburn offers a penetrating look at the longstanding battle these two groups have waged, examining the philosophical battles fought by Plato, Protagoras, William James, David Hume, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and many others, with a particularly fascinating look at Nietzsche. Among the questions Blackburn considers are: is science mere opinion, can historians understand another historical period, and indeed can one culture ever truly understand another. Blackburn concludes that both sides have merit, and that neither has exclusive ownership of truth. What is important is that, whichever side we embrace, we should know where we stand and what is to be said for our opponents.

Truth --- Epistemology

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Logic, Ancient. --- Truth.

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Truth. --- Vérité --- Plato.

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There is a principle in things, about which we cannot be deceived, but must always, on the contrary, recognize the truth - viz. that the same thing cannot at one and the same time be and not be" with these words of the Metaphysics, Aristotle introduced the Law of Non-Contradiction, which was to become the most authoritative principle in the history of Western thought. However, things have recently changed, and nowadays various philosophers, called dialetheists, claim that this Law does not hold unrestrictedly - that in peculiar circumstances the same thing may at the same time be and not be, and contradictions may obtain in the world. This book opens with an examination of the famous logical paradoxes that appear to speak on behalf of contradictions (e.g., the Liar paradox, the set-theoretic paradoxes such as Cantor's and Russell's), and of the reasons for the failure of the standard attempts to solve them. It provides, then, an introduction to paraconsistent logics - non-classical logics in which the admission of contradictions does not lead to logical chaos -, and their astonishing applications, going from inconsistent data base management to contradictory arithmetics capable of circumventing Gödel's celebrated Incompleteness Theorem. The final part of the book discusses the philosophical motivations and difficulties of dialetheism, and shows how to extract from Aristotle's ancient words a possible reply to the dialetheic challenge. How to Sell a Contradiction will appeal to anyone interested in non-classical logics, analytic metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics, and especially to those who consider challenging our most entrenched beliefs the main duty of philosophical inquiry.

Logic --- Contradiction --- Truth --- Inconsistency (Logic)