Wahrheit ist für ein verantwortungsvolles Forschen absolut grundlegend. Keine Gesellschaft kann es sich leisten, die Wahrheit zu verschmähen oder zu missachten. Wahrheit bedeutet Verlässlichkeit und Verbindlichkeit im gesellschaftlichen Leben. Der Erfolg unseres Handelns hängt von der Wahrheit ab. Unwissenheit kann uns zutiefst schaden. Ohne Wahrheit sind wir vom Glück verlassen. Ohne Wahrheit und Wissen können wir unser Leben nicht bewältigen. Wahrheit ist absolut nützlich. Als Voraussetzung für Rationalität und Realitätsverständnis ist der Unterschied zwischen Wahrsein und Falschsein äußerst wichtig. Wahrheit ist Voraussetzung für Wissen und Wahrhaftigkeit. Frankfurt beschreibt in diesem Buch den guten Zweck der Wahrheit.

This is a nice sequel to On Bullshit. He begins with the thought that truth has practical utility. He says, “Surely, it is unquestionable, regardless of what postmodernists or anyone else may say, that engineers and architects, for instance, must achieve—and do at times succeed in achieving—genuine objectivity.”

“No one in his right mind would rely on a builder, or submit to the care of a physician, who does not care about the truth.”

Chapter II begins, “Still, many people manage to convince themselves—that normative(i.e. evaluative) judgments cannot properly be regarded as being either true or false.”

“Surely it is apparent, however, that in large part we select the objects that we desire, that we love, and to which we commit ourselves, because of what we believe about them—for instance, that they will increase our wealth or protect our health, or that they will serve our interests in some other way.” “Unless we know whether we are justified in regarding various factual statements as true, we cannot know whether there is really any sense in feeling and choosing as we do.”

“Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot get along healthily without large quantities of reliable factual information.

“We need truth not only in order to understand how to live well, but in order to know how to survive at all.”

But we often ignore the dictates of rationality; why imagine that people will take truth seriously? Frankfurt brings in Spinoza who thinks that we will be compelled to be rational by love. “Spinoza was convinced that every individual has an essential nature that it strives, throughout its existence, to realize and sustain.”

“Spinoza believed it follows from this that people cannot help loving truth. They cannot help doing so, he thought, because they cannot help recognizing that truth is indispensable in enabling them to stay alive, to understand themselves, and to live fully in accord with their own natures.” P. 48

Why are truths useful at all? Because we must cope with reality. “Insofar as truths possess instrumental value, they do so because they capture and convey the nature of these realities.” “Without truth, either we have no opinion at all concerning how things are or our opinion is wrong.”

In Chapter Five, “…we could not properly consider ourselves to be functioning rationally at all if we did not acknowledge the difference between being true and being false.”

“It is because we appreciate that truth is important to us that we care about accumulating truths.” “When certain aspects of our experience fail to submit to our wishes, when they are on the contrary unyielding and even hostile to our interests, it then becomes clear to us that they are not parts of ourselves.”

“Thus, our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves.” This of course is similar to the point I have made in the past about how God cannot know himself before there is something else. Consciousness is of something.

A clareza do Professor Harry G. Frankfurt torna a leitura fácil e prazerosa, ainda que nos tempos atuais seja um tema espinhoso e que deagrada as pessoas de constituição psicológica e emocional fraca.

Completely disappointing...Gave 2 stars only for the references, I liked the Shakespeare's sonnet.

After reading another short of Frankfurt, On Bullshit, this one appeared a lot less witty and insightful.
Actually, I would say it feels like a tantrum provoked by the philosophical conundrum about the existence of unmediated perception of reality and the tough questions it raises about the concept of truth and its relation to reality.

This is a cute treatise on truth.

Harry may not go much deeper than "truth werks" and "that's pretty valuable".

Thus, bruh, we value truth whether we recognize it or not for it is necessary to operate in the world.

I particularly liked the part where Harry talks about how a friend lying to one is introducing a tear in one's worldview along with the focus on how dissociating truth-avoidance can be.

A follow up to Dr. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, On Truth is a compact argument on truth and why it matters, both to individuals and societies. Some will probably take umbrage to Dr. Frankfurt’s dismissal of post-modernism and its ‘facts are relative’ stance, but as someone educated in the post-postmodernist world of higher education, I very much enjoyed it. Much as I enjoyed On Bullshit, I think I enjoyed On Truth even more. Recommended.

Important ideas, difficult to fully grasp.

Memorable quotes:

"[W:]hatever benefits and rewards it may sometimes be possible to attain by bullshitting, by dissembling, or through sheer mendacity, societies cannot afford to tolerate anyone or anything that fosters a slovenly indifference to the distinction between true and false. Much less can they indulge the shabby, narcissistic pretense that being true to the facts is less important than being "true to oneself." If there is any attitude that is inherently antithetical to a decent and orderly social life, that is it." - Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth

This book made me want to be a philosophy major.

The exploration of the truth and the why it is important is a key part of our modern day. This essay is a must read in spelling out how why the pursuit of truth is as important as ever. I throughly enjoyed it and it made me take a step back and look at the way that I look at truth.

This “book” is about an hour and half if you listen to an audio version of it - about the length of a podcast. If I had found this when it came out and when I was much younger, I would have said “Okay sure!” while pretending to understand. Now, I understand it fine, and say “Okay, sure”.

I recommend reading it yourself as it’s not exactly a captivating listen. I will note that being lied to and accepting the lies as truth can make you feel crazy. Frankfurt didn’t have the buzzword “gaslight” to go with when he wrote this, but that’s basically what he’s talking about. I’ve also been in the relationship that’s described in that Shakespeare sonnet, and I don’t agree that if you can get to a point where you’re both aware of each others’ lies but accept the sentiment attached that you should stay in the relationship. Sure, it sounds romantic coming from Shakespeare, but is that really what you want, Harry? Being numb? That’s not love, that’s numbness.

Anyway! I probably shouldn’t count this as a book, but you can’t stop me.

Hoping for profound, got practical instead.

“Any society that manages to be even minimally functional must have, it seems to me, a robust appreciation of the endlessly protean utility of truth.” Thus does Frankfurt, an ethical philosopher, criticize post-modernist relativism and its legions of skeptics and cynics. After publishing his essay “On Bullshit,” wherein he deplores the prevalence and influence of bombastic insincerity in our society, Frankfurt realized that he needed to elaborate upon the value of its alternative, which is truth. Thus, he seems to say that bullshit cannot exist except in contraposition to the truth. The ability to determine one from the other is a societal survival skill.

This is so, first, because truth is pragmatic. We depend on a consensual agreement upon certain cause-and-effect phenomena as leading to results. Without proven truths to guide our efforts, things can’t get done. Rome wasn’t built upon wishful thinking. It seems to me, though, that equating physical reality with truth is not very intellectually satisfying. Plato believed that Truth was a universal and eternal quality from which reality derived its existence. It feels less magical to infer the opposite, that something is true because it describes reality.

Also, I’m not convinced that bullshit is incapable of delivering outcomes, even useful ones. Such efficacious bullshit might otherwise be called rhetoric.

Still, it cannot be denied that truth delivers the goods, and that as rational beings, we must analyze propositions according to whether they conform to truth as we know it. As Frankfurt points out, some of our earliest, most formative impressions of our own selfhood pertain to what experience teaches us is true and what is not – “When certain aspects of experience fail to submit to our wishes, it then becomes clear to us that they are not part of ourselves,” so “That is the origin of our concept of reality, which is essentially what limits us, of what we cannot alter or control by the mere movement of our will.” Reality defines who we are and what we do. And that’s the truth.