State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem. I also believe that disinformation has different effects depending on who promotes it – particularly whether it is promoted by a person with a public role. Importantly, the law of many countries already reflects this distinction – across a variety of contexts, public officials are obligated both to affirmatively provide certain types of information, and to take steps to ensure that information is true. In contrast, private individuals rarely bear analogous obligations; instead, law often protects their misstatements, in order to prevent censorship and promote public discourse.

Today is a time of retrogression in sustaining rights-protecting democracies, and of high levels of distrust in institutions. Of particular concern are threats to the institutions, including universities and the press, that help provide the information base for successful democracies. Attacks on universities, and university faculties, are rising. In Poland over the last four years, a world-renowned constitutional law theorist, Wojciech Sadurski, has been subject to civil and criminal prosecutions for defamation of the governing party. In Hungary, the Central European University (CEU) was ejected by the government, and had to partly relocate to Vienna, and other attacks on academic freedom followed. Faculty members in a number of countries have needed to relocate to other countries for their own safety. Governments attack what subjects can be taught – in Hungary bans on gender studies; in Poland, a government minister issued a call to ban gender studies and ‘LGBT ideology’. Attacks on academics and universities, through government restrictions and public or private violence, are not limited to Poland and Hungary, but are of concern in Brazil, India, Turkey and a range of other countries. Attacks on journalists are similarly rising. These developments are deeply concerning. The proliferation of ‘fake news’, doctored photos and false claims on social media has been widely documented. Constitutional democracy cannot long be sustained in an ‘age of lies’, where truth and knowledge no longer matter.

In April 2023, the Government of India amended a set of regulations called the Information Technology Rules, which primarily dealt with issues around online intermediary liability and safe harbour. Until 2023, these rules required online intermediaries to take all reasonable efforts to ensure that ‘fake, false or misleading’ information was not published on their platforms. Previous iterations of these rules had already been challenged before the Indian courts for imposing a disproportionate burden on intermediaries, and having the effect of chilling online speech. Now, the 2023 Amendment went even further: it introduced an entity called a ‘Fact Check Unit’, to be created by the government. This government-created unit would flag information that – in its view – was ‘fake, false or misleading’ with respect to ‘the business of the central government’. Online intermediaries were then obligated to make reasonable efforts to ensure that any such flagged information would not be on their platforms. In practical terms, what this meant was that if intermediaries did not take down flagged speech, they risked losing their safe harbour (guaranteed under the Information Technology Act).

In United States v. Alvarez, the US Supreme Court ruled that an official of a water district who introduced himself to his constituents by falsely stating in a public meeting that he had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor had a First Amendment right to make that demonstrably untrue claim. Audience members misled by the statement might well be considered to have a First Amendment interest in not being directly and knowingly lied to in that way. Other members of the community might be thought to have a First Amendment interest in public officials such as Xavier Alvarez telling the truth about their credentials and experiences. Nevertheless, as both the plurality and the concurring justices who together formed the majority in Alvarez viewed the case, it was the liar’s interest in saying what he wished that carried the day. Why is that? Crucial to answering this question is whether ‘the freedom of speech’ that the First Amendment tolerates ‘no law abridging’ is understood to be primarily speaker-centered, audience-centered, or society-centered.

Gadamer’s attitude to Collingwood was marked by ambivalence: while promoting the Englishman on the one hand, Gadamer claimed on the other that the fundamental dimension of “hermeneutical mediation” had simply escaped him. In this paper, I aim both to assess Gadamer’s debt to Collingwood and the prima facie strength of his objections. First, I reconstruct steps by which ideas of Collingwood found their place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the 1950s, including the central “axiom of all hermeneutics”: the thesis that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Second, I examine Gadamer’s main objections to Collingwood, the first one being based on a misunderstanding of Collingwood’s stance, while the second one hits home, and I argue in the final section that at issue here is Collingwood’s claim that it is possible to rethink exactly the same thought as that of, say, an historical agent, while Gadamer holds precisely the opposite view, that this is never possible.

Collingwood’s criticism of analytic philosophy is essentially an accusation of ahistoricality and implicit dogmatism. Russell and Moore, who are Collingwood’s primary targets, had a theory of analysis that would clarify sentences by situating them in the context of all possible expressive power. This strategy is what I call single-commitment tracking. Collingwood argues that there is no way of providing a non-dogmatic account of the constitutive features of a single-commitment tracking account. Instead, Collingwood adopts multi-commitment tracking, in which an expressed commitment set has its constitutive features, which Collingwood calls “absolute presuppositions,” made explicit by an expressing commitment set. This achieves the clarity desired by analytic philosophy, but also introduces something which itself is uninterpreted. So, there is no explicatable context of all possible expressive power, and Collingwood has shown that it is only by engaging in this method of explicating absolute presuppositions, which he calls metaphysics, that new expressive power is unlocked.

This an assessment of the main themes and arguments of the book. Looking back at Brexit, what is most striking is the subsequent economic decline of the UK – a consequence of Leave demagogues diverting voters’ attention from economic risks. Brexit’s populism was a manifestation of the Europe-wide rise of identitarian politics, the normalisation of national populism and the drift toward authoritarianism. These trends went with viewing the world as a collection separate sovereign nation states. A national population was imagined as a homogeneous mass, potentially embodied in a single sovereign leader. Seeing nations as separated entities brings a focus on foreign others, exemplified in the Brexiters’ fixation on immigration into the UK. Demagoguery, bound up with ‘post-truth’ culture, is used as an explanatory concept throughout this book, but requires redefinition in the age of mass media, data collection and psychological profiling. The most important conclusion is that Brexitspeak, Brexit policies and Brexit attitudes in government constitute threats to representative democracy, foreshadowed in the referendum process and actions by post-Brexit governments.

This chapter argues that Collingwood’s “logic of question and answer” (LQA) can best be understood in the light of contemporary argumentation theory. Even if Collingwood quite often describes LQA in terms of inner thinking and reasoning, as was still usual in his time, his insistence on the normative (“criteriological”) character of LQA, paired with his attack on the pretensions of psychologists to describe logic (as well as other normative endeavours) in a purely empirical manner, makes clear that LQA has the same aspirations as the rising discipline of formal (mathematical) logic. The concise exposition of the form, content, and application of LQA is supported by references to all the relevant passages in Collingwood’s oeuvre as well as illustrated by means of a concrete example of his way of doing history. Although a recent and still developing discipline, contemporary argumentation theory was born as an attempt to describe and analyze argumentative texts as guided by norms constitutive of our argumentative practices in a way that completely escapes formal logic. It thus provides a place for LQA that has so far been lacking.

The Japujī is Guru Nanak’s foundational hymn. Its thirty-eight stanzas are symmetrically set within a prologue and an epilogue. Seven vital aspects of Guru Nanak’s transcendent aesthetics emerge in this inaugural Guru Granth Sahib hymn: (1) aesthetic agents (panc) who invite audiences to join them on a spiritual excursion; (2) aesthetic keynote, the transcendent Nanakian material (mūlmantra); (3) the aesthetic thirty-eight stairsteps (pauṛis) leading to ever new vistas; (4) the aesthetic realm (saram khanḍ) where epistemic faculties are honed; (5) aesthetic disclosures of the ontological design (hukam) in the writing of this multiverse (lekhā) by the look of love (nadar); (6) aesthetic productions of truth (sat), beauty (suhāṇu), and enduring joy (sadā mani cāo) which reproduce an ethics of joy – singing (gāviai), listening (suniai), embracing (maniai), and loving (manu rakhiai bhāo); (7) an aesthetic epilogue, a scene capturing everyday aesthetics – the whole world playing together with night and day as the midwives and caretakers. Guru Nanak’s consummate composition fulfills Luce Irigaray’s desire that transcendence is a bodily realization here and now.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.

The feeling of shame (aischunē) is a dramatic key of the Gorgias, notably revealed by Callicles, who accuses both the master of rhetoric Gorgias and Polus of surrendering to Socrates’ refutation out of shame, before yielding himself to the feeling he declared himself immune to. But shame is not only a literary pattern in the dialogue: its function is closely connected to the kind of refutation of each interlocutor. It can be minimally said that shame is a natural effect of refutation, and optimally that it is an essential lever for Socrates to make his interlocutors acknowledge their deep moral commitments. This chapter aims at distinguishing several levels, rather than kinds, of shame among the interlocutors of the Gorgias: shame as sensitivity to others’ opinion, shame as an indication of the beliefs and values we are committed to, and shame as a potential step towards a better understanding of the real good. Though these levels sometimes overlap in the narrative, such distinctions may aid in understanding the role of shame for each interlocutor. Shame remains, for Plato, an ambiguous emotion, which must be used in a certain way to perform purification of wrong opinions.

Nietzsche wrote in 1870 while preparing The Birth of Tragedy (1872), “Science, art, and philosophy are now growing into one another so much in me that I shall in any case give birth to a centaur one day.” The project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art Nietzsche adumbrates here actually gets realized in The Birth of Tragedy, explaining the work’s distinctive character. It is a project whose origins lay with Friedrich Schlegel, the leading German Romantic philosopher, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schlegel had warded off the obvious objection to incorporating art into philosophy/science that this would falsify the latter by championing a radical general skepticism about the veracity of cognition. Nietzsche takes over this aspect of Schlegel’s project as well. Moreover, this whole project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art in light of a radical general skepticism survives after The Birth of Tragedy to reappear in different, more refined permutations throughout Nietzsche’s later works, constituting an indispensable key both to their character – in particular, their metaphysical-epistemological framework – and to their development. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the viability of the project, especially concerning the question of whether or not the radical general skepticism on which it rests is coherent.

Truth and content are theoretically prior in Frege to the act of judgment. Wittgenstein takes the opposite view, maintaining that truth is fundamentally correctness in judgment and that a content is fundamentally something to be judged. At Tractatus 4.063, Wittgenstein gives an argument against the Fregean position. Judgment can aim internally at truth, Wittgenstein holds, only if it is internal to truth that it is correctness in judgment.

This chapter turns to Herodotus’ unique narratorial reticence in making firm truth claims. "What is said" and "what seems" are found with much greater frequency than "what is true." Juxtaposing the Histories with contemporary discussions on epistemology will demonstrate the extent to which truth was problematized as a standard of inquiry in the fifth century. The narrator’s response to this is to use truth as an elusive criterion in order to highlight the difficulty of meeting its conditions. The final portion of this chapter looks to the frequency of "veridical" εἰμί in the Histories and points to its status as a criterion of accuracy in Presocratic epistemology. It argues for its incorporation in historical narrative as a distinctive marker of epistemic certainty.

Kripke finds in Wittgenstein an argument for the view that there is no such thing as meaning. A key premise in that argument is that there are semantic norms – norms governing the uses of expressions that hold in virtue of what those expressions mean. Standardly, those norms are understood to be norms of truth – roughly, they permit truly applying expressions and prohibit falsely applying them. An increasing number of philosophers reject the standard interpretation. In this chapter, I explore alternative construals due to Alan Millar and Indrek Reiland and argue that they are either unmotivated or not competitors with the standard account. In doing so, I defend a kind of pluralism about semantic normativity. If there are norms of truth that hold in virtue of what expressions mean, there will be further norms that make reference to the doxastic, epistemic, and motivational states of language-users, norms that are explanatory posterior to the norms of truth.

Chapter 2 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language argues that there are no facts about what anyone means by their words, so meaning is a fiction. But some fictions are useful, and Chapter 3 explains why this one is. One side-effect of that explanation is supposed to be the “Private and solitary language argument,” which says that we cannot, or at least cannot usefully, ascribe meaning to an individual “considered in isolation”; it thereby reveals something essentially communitarian about meaning.

This chapter briefly defends that fictionalist reading of Kripke’s great work before arguing at more length that no communitarian conclusion follows. Even if semantic ascriptions are all false, they may still be useful, even when made by, or applied to, or addressed by, an individual “considered in isolation”– whatever exactly this turns out to mean.

This chapter deals with the issue of epistemology or the oftentimes implicit theories of knowledge that guide research and methodological choices. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of what it means to live in a society in which the factual basis of truth can be easily questioned – the post-truth climate. It then outlines several popular conceptions and misconceptions about epistemology and maps out some of the main epistemological positions that inspired if not research then certainly philosophical debate. The second part of the chapter argues for pragmatism as an epistemology that can help us deal with the complexities of doing empirical research in a post-truth context by transcending the old realist–relativist divide and fostering methodological pluralism.