Customer Reviews

The Liar: An Essay on Truth and Circularity

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Anyone at all familiar with epistemology will note the frustrating fact all of our categorical statements are subject to the self referential fallacy. For example, the relativist who asserts "All truth is relative" has just asserted a self defeating statement since he obviously wishes this statement to be the one exception. Afterall, if all truth is relative, so is the truth value of this statement, which henceforth is not true according to its own critieria. Of course, this isn't limited to formal statements which we assign as saying something about the world. Kurt Godel has shown that even statements whose extension is purely formal, and not empirical, contain paradox and pitfalls. The authors take their own knowledge in Symbolic Logic and attempt to look at these issues from a new angle. They don't merely repeat the same theses you see in other books and so the book is valuable for this reason. Merleau-Ponty, who was a follower of Heidegger, presented these issues in all their perplexity in his book "The Visible and the Invisible." In comparison, I prefer the analytic philosophical approach of the former over the phenomenological approach of the latter. However, both schools of thought are capable of giving profound insight on this topic of language and epistemological conundrums. Underlying all of these types of works, including this one, seems to be those continual debates that see no merits in the contravening philosophical position. Most noteworthy is the authors' failure to consider bibical theology as an intellecutal contribution to insights about the condition of human intelligence in a fallen world. For this reason, the book loses one star.