From Publishers Weekly
Despite its subtitle, the book is less a history of falsehood than of the concept of truth, with falsehood as an important corollary. Campbell's treatise suffers from a weak introduction that fails to set forth its plan, and from an unconvincing first two chapters on Darwin and the theme of nature as liar. After that, a methodical and enlightening march from antiquity to the present begins, analyzing notions of truth from pre-Socratics to postmodernists. The ancient Greek concept of the Logos, which guaranteed a fit between the human mind and the order of the universe, is effectively contrasted with the Sophists' denial of a "natural fit between mind, language, and reality." Though the chapter on medieval thought is inadequate, Campbell handles modern thinkers gracefully, following rival theories of truth from Descartes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Freud, Moore, Russell, Saussure and Wittgenstein. The last few chapters spotlight postmodern thinkers (notably Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Rorty) who have dismissed the distinction between truth and falsehood, promoting values such as pleasure and imagination while fostering the idea that "truth as well as falsehood are as dead as God." Campbell seems ambivalent toward the alleged death of truth: he appears equally unsatisfied by philosophical attempts to defend truth and with today's "almost unprecedented tolerance of falsehood." It would have been nice if Campbell had made his own position clearer. Even so, the book is a valuable account of how truth and falsehood got where they are today. (Aug.)Forecast: While the back of the galley promises that this book "turns Sissela Bok's Lying" the classic walk-through on a variety of moral quandaries "on its head," don't look for that book's displacement from the shelf. As a pointedly historical text, this book won't capture the imaginations of everyday readers (and liars), but may sell slowly and steadily as a solid popular account of some difficult thinkers.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Perhaps George Washington couldn't do it, but millions of lesser mortals now find it quite easy. Lying, that is. For Campbell, the modern world's astounding appetite for untruth demands an explanation. And it is no simple tale. In probing the history of prevarication, Campbell excavates the very foundations of philosophy and science to uncover the justifications for abandoning veracity. Radical skepticism here emerges as the great legitimator of falsehood, the corrosive enemy of truth. For if the human mind never really grasps truth, why censure the liar, who at least recognizes the illusions in his fictions? This genealogy of doubt gives us perceptive portraits of predictable figures, such as Ockham, Nietzsche, and Freud. But it is Darwin who looms surprisingly large, quietly subverting philosophy and logic with his dark suspicions as to how natural selection has primed the mind with strategies for deceit. But more than a few other modern intellectuals have joined Darwin in making our age sympathetic to deceivers: aesthetes have exempted art from all tests of veracity; ideologues have rationalized any fiction that advanced their cause; radical literary theorists have leeched all stable meaning out of canonical texts. Why tell the truth when deception can serve so many purposes? A book too disturbing to be ignored.
Bryce ChristensenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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