EBOUND Canada - Truth matters: knowledge, politics, ethics, religion

TRUTH MATTERS

Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion

EDITED BY
Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr,
Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker

McGill-Queens University Press 2013

ISBN 978-0-7735-4270-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-7735-8997-1 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-0-7735-8998-8 (ePUB)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2013
Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free.

The publication of this book is supported by generous grants from the ICS Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, the Calvin Centre for Christian Scholarship, and the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust.

McGill-Queens University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Truth matters : knowledge, politics, ethics, religion / edited by Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker.

Based on a conference held at the University of Toronto in August 2010.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7735-4270-9 (bound). ISBN 978-0-7735-8997-1 (ePDF).
ISBN 978-0-7735-8998-8 (ePUB)

1. Truth. I. Zuidervaart, Lambert, author, writer of preface, editor of compilation II. Carr, Allyson, writer of introduction, editor of compilation III. Klaassen, Matthew, writer of introduction, editor of compilation IV. Shuker, Ronnie, editor of compilation

BD171.T82 2013 121 C2013-906770-1

C2013-906771-X

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

Lambert Zuidervaart

Allyson Carr and Matthew J. Klaassen

Lambert Zuidervaart

Clarence W. Joldersma

Matthew Walhout

Olaf Ellefson

Darren R. Walhof

Adam Smith

Amy D. Richards

John Van Rys

Gerrit Glas

Jay A. Gupta

John J. Park

Doug Blomberg

Gill K. Goulding

Pamela J. Reeve

Jeffrey Dudiak

Calvin Seerveld

This book arises from Truth Matters, an interdisciplinary and international conference held at the University of Toronto in August 2010. The conference program spells out our motivation:

We live in an age of skepticism about the idea of truth. Contemporary skeptics question the nature and value of truth and the concomitant virtue of truthfulness. Skepticism about truth is not restricted to popular culture. It occurs within the academic world, where deflationists have argued that the idea of truth is not a substantive notion and some poststructuralists have portrayed it as primarily the scene of struggles for power. Such skepticism is surprising, for truth and truthfulness have been central to Western civilization and the academic enterprise. Given both contemporary skepticism and the centrality of truth, the conference organizers believe it is time to reconceptualize truth and to reclaim truthfulness for the academic enterprise.

Other motivations lie behind the conference and this book. Both intend to expand the scope of work on truth at the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS), which hosted the Truth Matters conference. Both aim to continue an animated dialogue about faith and scholarship among the conferences co-sponsors. Both also help launch a new venture at ICS called the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics (CPRSE).

ICS is an independent graduate school for interdisciplinary philosophy affiliated with the Toronto School of Theology (TST) at the University of Toronto. Each year ICSs masters and PHD students take an interdisciplinary seminar co-taught by ICSs faculty members. In the two years preceding the Truth Matters conference, these seminars studied the topic of truth: first truth in contemporary thought and then truth in the history of Western thought. The seminars asked whether a new approach to thinking about truth is needed and what such an approach would look like. ICS envisioned the Truth Matters conference as an occasion to welcome a wider range of disciplines and scholars into this discussion. This book has a similar aim.

ICS was founded in the 1960s by a dedicated group of Dutch immigrants who wished to establish a North American university in the Reformed tradition along the lines of the Vrije Universiteit, now known as the VU University Amsterdam (or VU for short). Most of ICSs founding faculty received their doctorates at VU, where they apprenticed in the reformational tradition of philosophy established by legal theorist Herman Dooyeweerd and philosopher Dirk Vollenhoven. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven regarded philosophy as an interdisciplinary enterprise whose insights should contribute to the transformation of culture and society, and they insisted that education and scholarship are not religiously neutral. From its beginnings, ICS has been inspired by this reformational vision, at the heart of which lies a dynamic conception of truth. Several chapters in this volume offer glimpses into what a reformational conception of truth might imply.

As a faculty member at ICS, the director of the Truth Matters conference, and the senior editor of this book, I have a personal stake in working out such a conception. Indeed, that is my current research project, and it has received impetus from ICSs interdisciplinary seminars, from the conference, and from essays such as those by Joldersma and Glas in this volume that take up my first attempts to offer a new and comprehensive conception of truth. I wish to acknowledge with thanks these generative contributions.

ICSs partners in putting on the Truth Matters conference included not only VU but also Calvin College and Dordt College in the United States. These four schools share an ethnic and religious heritage that stems from a neo-Calvinian social movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led by the Dutch educator, journalist, politician, and religious leader Abraham Kuyper. The Kuyperian movement has inspired two traditions of thought in North America: the reformational tradition, already mentioned, and Reformed epistemology, which is associated with such prominent analytic philosophers as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Since the early 1980s, ICS, Always in the background of these conferences, and sometimes explicitly in the foreground, were questions of truth: What is truth, and why does it matter? The most recent quadrilateral conference, in 2010, made these questions a central topic.

The Truth Matters conference would not have happened without substantial funding from ICS, Calvin College, Dordt College, and VU. Moreover, ICS and Calvin College have provided publication subsidies for this book via ICSs Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, directed by Ronald Kuipers, and the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship, directed by Susan Felch. The editors, all of whom helped organize the original conference, are very grateful for this institutional support. I also wish to mention with gratitude the generous grants the conference and this book have received from the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust.

The publication of Truth Matters is among the first fruits of ICSs new research centre. Founded shortly before the Truth Matters conference took place in 2010, CPRSE promotes philosophically primed and religiously attuned interdisciplinary research on leading questions of life and society. It has done so to date by establishing a new Toronto Interfaculty Colloquium for cross-disciplinary discussion and debate among faculty members at ICS, TST, the University of Toronto, and other schools; hosting public seminars on monographs authored by ICS faculty members and graduates; and organizing crosssectoral conferences for academics, professionals, and the wider public, such as Social Justice and Human Rights (Toronto, 2012) and an upcoming conference on Economic Justice (Edmonton, May 2014).