Off the Shelves 7

Continuing with the theme of contemporary philosophers we present Fr. Stanley Jaki OSB.

Fr. Jaki is a Hungarian-born priest of the Benedictine Order, member of the Pontifical Academy for Science and receipient of the Templeton Prize in 1987. Holding doctorates in both physics and theology, his publications have covered such diverse subjects as the Bible, clerical celibacy, Pierre Duhem, John Henry Newman, papacy, history and philosophy of science. In Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1999) he provides a "rigorous, highly original presentation of the claim that any consistent philosophy must be steeped in a realist epistemology that is fully open to metaphysics." The folowing is from chapter 1.

A book with the subtitle, "a treatise on truth", must, from its inception on, convey its author's resolve to face up to the question: What is truth? The question evokes Pilate's skepticism as well as Francis Bacon's observation: "'What is truth? said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.'" The reader is asked to stay for the length of a few paragraphs to see the first intimaitons of the answer to be unfolded in this treatise which is emphatically meant to be on truth and not on a set of opinions about it. Those who find ths dogmatic may very well reflect for a moment whether it is not the same dogmatism that motivates their reaction. An apparently detached but actually unswerving, that is, dogmatic adherence to this or that "opinion" or even to one's "considered view" should seem less commednable than an undisguised presentation of this or that statement of truth, even if this presses for dogmatism.

Opinions about truth are legion and invariably have a dogmatic touch to them. All the hundred and fifty or so dicta on truth in Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations lay down something very definite. It is affirmed that th value of truth is priceless, that truth is universal, that ultimately truth would triumph, that children and fools are alike prompt with it, that truth and roses are equally endowed with thorns, that truth is naked as well as tough. AMong these dicta there is, however, only one that would qualify as an answer to the question, What is Truth? Even Shakespeare's answer, "Truth is truth, until the end of reckoning", is in part an apparent tautology and in part an assertion of truth's exacting nature. Shakespeare, to whom we owe many pithy statements, full of philosophical depth, could, of course, very well suggest that truth was tuth because it was irreducible to anything else and the reckoning merely separated truth from falsehood.

In Mencken's list, which is chronological, three scores of names are from antiquity, Tertullian being the last of them. The next in the list is Wyclif. The two are separated by twelve centuries, most of them medieval centuries, all apparently void of quotable remarks about truth. Yet to that age belongs a definition of truth which would certainly pass for a straight answer to the plain question, What is Truth. The answer, "adequatio rei ad intellectum", is Aquinas' definition of truth. It often turns up in modern reflections on philosophy in proof of the universally shared conviction that truth somehow be connected with reality. [1]

Instead of relaity it may be better to speak of objects. The immediate and pressing reason for speaking of objects rather than of reality, does not lie in the incredibly vast extent and variety of meanings that can and have been attached to the word truth. The reason relates to the title of this book, "means to message". Whenever a philosopher offers the kind of message which is philosophy, it must contain, at the very minimum, a justification of the means used to convey the message to beings no less real than the author himself. The means therefore is not a medium, or a tool contrived for the purpose of making the message indistinguishable from its packaging or even subordinate to it. Whereas Marshall McLuhan of "the medium is the message" fame helped focus on this widespread abuse in communications, he did not care to disentangle the means from the medium. As a result he unwittingly fueled an abuse already reaching crisis proportions in public discourse, where what counts is no longer the message but the manner in which it is perceived. This sinister trend has not spared discourse about philosophy. In the "publish or perish" syndrome the book counts more than its message, which, to make all this worse, hardly ever contains even a fleeting reflection of the truth of the book itself.

[1] "Adequatio rei ad intellectum" is translated "the conformity of what is conceived in the mind with what actually exists outside the mind."