On the Relationship between Truth and Liberal Politics
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
EL TRATAMIENTO NEOPRAGMATISTA DE LA VERDAD EN RICHARD RORTY NEOPRAGMATIST TREATMENT OF TRUTH IN RICHARD RORTY
Richard Rorty, one of the most influential authors of our time, presents a critique of the philosophical concept of truth as correspondence. The conclusion of Rorty's neopragmatism is that the idea of truth as correspondence between language and facts is ineffective because it no longer works. The neopragmatist conception of truth indicates the only possible uses for the term «truthful,» revolving around the idea of jus - tification. In this article, the neopragmatist notion of truth is presented in order to
Phenomenology and homeopathy.
There is a great overlap between the way of seeing the world in clinical homeopathy and in the technical philosophical system known as phenomenology. A knowledge of phenomenologic principles reveals Hahnemann to have been an unwitting phenomenologist. The ideas of phenomenology as applied to medicine show that homeopathy is the ideal medical system to fulfill the goals of coming ever closer to true patient concerns and experience of illness.