Lying and Truthfulness

Who lies? Not just children, politicians, advertisers, and salespeople. Our co-workers lie. Our friends lie. Our relatives lie. And we lie to them. Everybody lies.

We learn to lie and to detect deceit as a developmental task. Dr. Ford's concept is that lying is part of the bridge between one's internal world (beliefs, perceptions, expectations, fantasies) and one's external world (reality). Lies work not only to deceive others but to deceive ourselves.

This book shines a spotlight on an understudied phenomenon that affects us all as we raise children, choose a relationship, move forward with a career path, or buy a used car.

Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski is renowned worldwide for wrestling with serious philosophical conundrums with dazzling elegance. In this new book, he turns his characteristic wit to important themes of ordinary life, from the need for freedom to the wheel of fortune, from the nature of God to the ambiguities of betrayal. Extremely lucid and lacking in intellectual pretension, these essays speak in everyday language, spurring the reader's own thoughts and providing a handle on which to debate and think about the themes. The eighteen essays cover the following topics: power, fame, equality, lying, toleration, travel, virtue, collective responsibility, the wheel of fortune, betrayal, violence, boredom, freedom, luxury, God, respect for nature, superstition, and national stereotypes.

Mass literacy, mass communication, and the Internet have all increased the amount of information available. But false knowledge still abounds. Taking cues from Sir Thomas Browne, the English Renaissance skeptic, this title examines a host of contemporary errors in thinking and offers a powerful explanation of why they occur.

This book attempts to synthesize a pervasive phenomenon that is mentioned tangentially in political analyses, but here receives a systematic & theoretical treatment commensurate with its significance to the working of 'democratic' political practice.