Delightful. I would like to read more essays bound in tiny hardcover books. I read this on the same day as On Bullshit by the same author.
Again, a great essay on the value of objective truth, while the first book was showing the corruption of denying objective truth (hello postmodernism).
I don't think this case for truth would have been as compelling without first the dissection of BS. It must be in our nature to easily spot something that is off, rather than to resound with praise for something that is good.
Through these two essays, Frankfurt shows what we should leave behind and why we should pursue what's on the other side once you turn around.

I think this writer does an excellent job making a case on very simple, accessible grounds, appealing to common sense. In effect, showing that the value of objective truth is not just some far-off ideal that philosophers theorize about, but something that is important to every human individual. In fact, related to our very survival/preservation and our self-love.
I enjoyed the inclusion of philosophy and the shout out to Spinoza, too.

Clear no-bullshitting language. But also not many revelations.
The Shakespeare Sonnet 138 part nice:
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies...

A nice essay wrapped in a gold coloured book. In all truth, it doesn't answer all the issues around truth but sidesteps it. What use is the truth in a practical way? There is some reference to bullshit as this is a bit of an answer on why bullshit matters. it is so odd to read this in the age where truth is not so much as a casualty but something that is dismissed as unnecessary. To that, this is an effective argument.

Several references are made about what use truth is to societies and i can't help but wonder if this was written in reference to those who are currently ignoring truth as points of view. Seems that both the right and the left have something to answer about that...

“Мы действительно не можем жить без истины. Истина нужна нам не только для того, чтобы понимать, как хорошо жить, но и для того, чтобы знать, как вообще выживать. Более того, она является тем, что мы просто не можем не замечать. Мы тем самым всегда уже признаем, пусть и неявно, что истина важна для нас; и, следовательно, мы всегда уже понимаем (пусть и снова неявным образом), что истина – это не просто свойство убеждения, к которому мы можем позволить себе быть равнодушными. Такое равнодушие было бы не просто результатом халатной небрежности – оно быстро оказалось бы для нас фатальным. Следовательно, в той мере, в какой мы ценим важность истины для нас, мы в принципе не можем позволить себе отказаться от желания знать истину о множестве самых разных вещей, либо от желания достичь ее.”

So Americans pay their taxes so this bureaucrat can write more bullshit, this time on another theme.

I don't write many reviews for books to which I give less than three stars; in fact, I rarely rate books that low at all. But this was fairly ridiculous.

I found this by accident in my local library because it was at the end of a shelf near another book I wanted to read, and I resolved to read it next because I enjoyed his earlier n  On Bullshitn so very much. In the end, however, it became clear to me that Frankfurt is far more familiar with bullshit than with truth.

Basically, the entire, relatively short tract reads as a bitter screed against postmodernism. Now, I'm no great fan of that aberrant offshoot of western philosophy myself, in part because it seems to me to eat its own tail if carried out far enough, which I suppose is among the reasons why it has fallen somewhat out of favor in the last decade (apart from having been done to death in pop culture). Nevertheless, it strikes me as ludicrous to dismiss the entire field out of hand, especially if one isn't going to do so well and convincingly.

The author early exhibits a fundamental inability or unwillingness to distinguish between relative and absolute truth, which concept was well established in eastern philosophies over a millennium ago, even if it took longer to penetrate the west. He then goes on to adopt an error from the Ethics of Spinoza to assert an imperative link between Love, Joy, and Truth, and then posits immutable truths while evidently ignoring the fundamentally mutable nature of phenomenological reality, and failing to recognize the influence of culture on the construction and perception of these questionable truths.

Amazingly, he also fails herein to distinguish between bullshit and lying, which was half the substance of his previous book. He then fails to carry his own acknowledgement "that we cannot realistically be confident of our own ability to distinguish truth from falsity" to its necessary conclusion. In what may be a misguided attempt to take a literary turn, he thoroughly misreads Shakespeare's Sonnet 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") in order to completely undermine his own central thesis, and finally wraps up by flattening the spectra of both factuality and utility into an untenable binary system.

I still recommend On Bullshit highly as a primer on the rhetoric of the early 21st century, but I also strongly recommend giving this one a miss unless one needs a cogent example of how a professor emeritus should NOT construct an epistemological argument. It's one "get off my lawn!" short of a rant. However, since it was amusingly well-written in spite of all this, and I did enjoy reading (and mentally arguing with) it a bit, I give it two stars instead of one.

(Edited for typos 2017-06-09)

There’s a good argument to be made for truth, I don’t think Frankfurt quite makes it. He drops some key points in favor of more peripheral tangents.

Perhaps I am simply spoiled by the more direct and straightforward writings I usually read when I am in the mood to explore philosophical concepts. Or maybe, having not read “On Bullshit” took away from the full impact of this work for me.

I was hoping to find a new perspective on the idea of “truth” when I picked this up, but in the end, I did not.

This is a somewhat interesting volume on aspects of the truth. Unfortunately, it was for me a rather dull book, as it was mostly about abstractions. It was relatively easy to read, not conceptually difficult, but just dull.

I enjoyed reading the bit about the lovers in a sonnet by Shakespeare who lie to each other for their own reasons, and how each knows the other is lying, and goes along with the lies, which somehow binds them closer to each other, since this story demonstrated that sometimes people need to subscribe to lies, and maybe even live a lie, partially, to survive.

The truth is what we all strive for - those who lie are, as Frankfurt said, in a world of their own and thus unreachable. Also, being deceived does make us feel a little crazy as we usually feel we know we can tell a lie from the truth.

Yet, the truth is, many could not survive without lies, especially lies that people tell each other that each know are lies etc.

Since this book is not a page-turner, I found it impossible to become too interested in it. I thought it was in general, dry. It took me a long time to read this rather slender book because I never became that interested in it. Still, it was somewhat interesting to the extent that the topic itself, which is usually taken for granted (i.e. we all know what is the truth, and why we need to pursue it, and tell the truth and so forth) was treated in a thorough, thought-provoking manner.

This book is very awesome, I never expect to enjoy it, even tho, the beginning of the book they curse a lot, and it's kind of funny, but later on in the book, it doesn't need to be funny at all, is all about the truth, and truth only. It tells you aspects how we lie, often, and we grow up lying often as we should be telling the truth. To be honest, we should always tell the truth, because if we keep lying not to the other person you're talking, but to yourself it will be something so disastrous. Is best to go to the truth even if is hurting another person or keeping away from other people because if you sink in your own lie, nobody will help you to get out, but yourself.

Not as challenging or as boisterous as "On Bullshit," but Frankfurt lays down a solid foundation for truth as the cornerstone of a personal philosophy. At its core he states that humans rarely look at themselves and their circumstances in a forthright and truthful manner and this in turn causes us distress. I can see readers misenterpereting this as a light self-help book, but there is some good elementary and utilitarian philosophy here.

3.5 stars.

A study on truth that is interesting at times but largely inferior to its predecessor On Bullshit.
Ranting and somewhat incoherent at times, the density of the text leads information to be desired, where this was not the case in On Bullshit.
I believe there is a reason this was published by Knopf instead of the Princeton University Press, as it doesn't meet the academic standards of Frankfurt's previous works.