On today's show (i.e., Sunday January 28, 2007) Ken and I will interview Harry Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Frankfurt has been around a long time, even longer than me, I think. He has written important work on Descartes and the Cartesian Circle (seeDemons, Dreamers, and Madmen, 1970), freedom and free will (seeFreedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person in theJournal of Philosophy, 1971) and related issues of caring, love, identity and much else (seeThe Importance of What We Care about: Philosophical Essays, 1988,Necessity, Volition, and Love, 1999 and认真对待自己并做好它，2005)。Today we'll focus on, or at least begin with, his two best-selling little books,On Bullshit, 2005, andOn Truth,2006. The first decries and defines bullshit; it assumes we care about the truth, the second tells us why we should.

Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom," or so I am told. Modern analytic philosophers might find "wisdom" a little pompous, and prefer "love of truth" as an articulation of the central aim of philosophers. Of course, love of, or devotion to, truth, is not peculiar to philosophy. But still, it is a central aim. But philosophy is also, as we like to say on Philosophy Talk, devoted to questioning everything (except your intelligence), then we are committed to questioning the central aims of philosophy, including truth, and the value of questioning everything.

Frankfurt makes the point that truth is often of practical significance. This is certainly true in life's mundane affairs. If I want to show up for the program on time, it's better that I think that it will start at 10 a.m., when it will start, than 11 a.m., by which time it will be over. If I want to drive there, it's best if my gas gauge is correct, so that I don' t think my tank is full when it is empty.

一些不那么平凡的事情也是如此。布什入侵伊拉克时认为伊拉克拥有大规模杀伤性武器。从那时起，我们就被告知这不是事实并不重要。布什说他会重新来过，即使他当时知道他现在知道的;就连克里也拿不定主意，知道他现在知道的情况是否会改变他的投票。布什和克里的思维过程就更糟糕了。

A distinction worth making, I think, is between cases in which the truth is important because the subject matter involved is itself important, independently of whether people know or care about it, and cases in which the truth is only derivatively important, because philosophers or others care about it, and if we get something wrong we will be in some sort of trouble with these people. It matters if the earth is getting warmer, particularly if there is something we can do about it. This was so, before we realized it was getting warmer, and it would be so, even if we hadn't figured it out yet. It is the warmng of the earth that will have many effects on human life, which if we know the truth we may be able to prevent, or at least prepare for.

But consider the fact that Locke's chapter on personal identity only appeared in the second edition of hisEssay.That's important to me. It means we can't appeal to his theory of personal identity to explain other parts of hisEssay, that already appeared in the first edition. If I don't know this fact, I may say something stupid about theEssay. Other Locke fans may think less of me. And so forth. The negative effects not knowing the truth don't stem in any direct way from Locke and his writings, but from the fact that other people care about getting the facts about Locke right.

Once there was a scholarly debate about whether Berkeley suffered from chronic constipation. A whole book was written on this subject, and it provoked many articles. Berkeley's chronic constipation, if he had that problem, was important to him, and knowing the truth about it may have been important to the folks that dealt with him --- tar water merchants and the like. But whether he did or not had no effect on anyone who took part in this debate. All that mattered was that they and other people were curious, and cared one way or another.

如果我们诚实的话，我们似乎不得不承认，人文学科的许多研究都与那些真相没有直接重要性的主题有关;它只有这种间接的重要性，因为人们出于某种原因已经开始关心它了。而且，我怀疑，很多数学研究，尤其是像大型基数理论这样的主题，也有这个特点。坦率地说，我怀疑这涉及了太多的科学。我们正在发现火星上是否曾经有水的真相，这真的很酷。也许它有直接的重要性，因为有一天我们会在火星上有殖民地，或者我们对火星的一些了解，会打开那里是否有水，会导致癌症或脚癣的治疗，或者上帝知道的什么。

Be that as it may, I don't think the money we spend on finding out whether Mars has water could be justified on a hard-nosed cost benefit analysis, any more than the (very modest) amounts we spend on learning minutae about the composition of the works of dead philosophers or novelists could be. The truth about these things is most likely only important because people care about it.

有时哲学家和其他热爱真理、追求真理的人，为他们的事业寻求一个比他们关心他们所研究的事物的真理更为坚实的基础，其他人也是如此。对真理的探索成为人类真正的使命，人类精神的不可避免的致密，或类似的东西。在这一点上，真理的爱好者变成了胡说八道的提供者。

Or so it seems to me right now. Insight? Or chronic constipation?