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Home / Podcast Episodes / Ep. 61: Nietzsche on Truth and Skepticism
Friedrich Niezsche

Ep. 61: Nietzsche on Truth and Skepticism

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Episode for Purchase: On Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873). What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche’s career, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the “truths” we tell each other are just agreements by social convention. WIth guest Jessica Berry, who argues that that Nietzsche is a skeptic: our “truths” don’t correspond with the world beyond our human conceptions; all knowledge is laden with human interests.

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Category: Podcast Episodes Tags: epistemology, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jessica Berry, Pragmatism, skepticism, will to truth
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On Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873). For Wes Alwan's summary of this essay, go here).

What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche's career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the "truths" we tell each other are just agreements by social convention.

Guest Jessica Berry argues that Nietzsche is really just being a skeptic here: our "truths" don't correspond with the thing-in-itself, i.e. the world beyond our human conceptions. He wants us to understand that all knowledge is laden with human interests. Taken this way, the essay won't undermine itself; if he isn't saying "there is no truth," then that claim won't apply to itself.

What Nietzsche for sure does say is that the "will to truth" that philosophers so prize is puzzling, given how beneficial to our survival many mutually held illusions are: we're safe, things are stable, we understand our environment. When philosophers declare truth to be the most valuable thing, they're going beyond the mundane purposes for which the will to truth developed (e.g. communicating in a consistent way to our mutual benefit) and massively overestimating our capability to know the world as it "really" is.

Read more on the topic and buy the book.

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Running Time: 1 hr., 50 min. Recorded: July 17, 2012. Participants: Mark, Wes, Dylan, Jessica Berry.

As a bonus, your purchase includes high-bitrate mp3 of "Stupidly Normal," from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998).

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