Overview
Is there 'truth' even if it is not certain and we cannot be certain about it? Sontag answers a resounding 'yes' in Uncertain Truth asserting that, in a skeptical time, truth is still possible but is not ours to possess with certainty. 'Truth' must therefore be reconceived in its philosophical perspective. Contents: Truth and Theory; Freud and Universal Theory; Truth as Fictive; Darwin's Rebuff to Experience and to Common Sense; Observable Truth; Universals: Useful in Science, Distorting in Human Nature; Reversing the Fall, Building Up Eden; Biblical Truth; 'The Oath against Modernism'; Faults on the Road to Truth; The Good vs. the True; Gossip, Rumor, Prejudice and Truth, Fact and Description; Misrepresenting Truth; Philosophical Fashions; The Rise and Fall of Intellectual Empires; Truth in Cultural Context; Prejudice, Discrimination and Hierarchy; Discovering Truth; Fictional Truth; Surface Truth; 'For no beginnings are in the intellect'; The World According to Yeats; The Despotism of Fact; Imaginative Truth; An Age of Imagination; The Art of the Unseen; The Reference of Our Dreams; Romanticism Restored; The Designer of the Locks Holds the Unavailable Keys; The Argument for God at the End of the 20th Century.
Synopsis
Is there 'truth' even if it is not certain and we cannot be certain about it? Sontag answers a resounding 'yes' in Uncertain Truth asserting that, in a skeptical time, truth is still possible but is not ours to possess with certainty. 'Truth' must therefore be reconceived in its philosophical perspective.