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 conference’s 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 ICS’s master’s and PHD students take an interdisciplinary seminar co-taught by ICS’s 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 ICS’s 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 ICS’s 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.
ICS’s 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, VU, Calvin, and Dordt have co-sponsored several “quadrilateral” conferences to promote dialogue among their faculties on issues of faith, life, and scholarship. Given both the religious affinities and intellectual differences between reformational philosophy and Reformed epistemology, it is not surprising that the first of these conferences, held at ICS in 1981, brought together scholars from both traditions, as well as from a Scots Presbyterian background, to examine “Rationality in the Calvinian Tradition.”1 Subsequent quadrilateral conferences have examined the role of worldviews in the social sciences (Calvin College, 1985), tensions between universal norms and particular contexts (vu, 1987), controversies concerning traditional conceptions of creation order (ics, 1992), the role of the arts in a democratic society (Calvin College, 1995), and different ways of knowing (Dordt College, 1998).2 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 ICS’s 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 ICS’s 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). Truth Matters is the first book to emerge from CPRSE’s work. Specifically, Allyson Carr, Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker did their editorial work as CPRSE research assistants when I served as the centre’s founding director (2010 to 2012), and Allyson has subsequently become the centre’s associate director. In the final stages of editing, Allyson and I benefitted from the expert research assistance provided by Sarah Hyland and Carolyn Mackie, both MA students at ICS. We appreciate the enthusiastic support ICS has given to this new venture; personally, I am also grateful for the excellent work done by my editorial teammates and CPRSE’s research assistants.
The four editors also wish to acknowledge several publishers for their permission to reprint essays that have appeared elsewhere. As footnotes in the relevant chapters indicate, the essay by Gerrit Glas and my own essay were first published in Philosophia Reformata, the journal of record for reformational thought established by Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven in 1935; Clarence Joldersma’s essay appeared in the journal Educational Theory, published by John Wiley and Sons; and Calvin Seerveld’s essay is included, with art reproductions, in a volume of his collected writings published by Dordt College Press. We are happy to have received permission from these publishers to include the essays in this volume.
Although this book, like the conference that preceded it, arises from interdisciplinary seminars at ICS and from an ongoing discussion among faculty members at four schools with roots in the Kuyperian tradition, it includes authors from other schools and traditions and it invites any reader concerned about truth to consider the various perspectives it encompasses. The book does not presume to provide a unified conception of truth. If it offers a central insight, perhaps it is this: although there is propositional truth, and although propositional truth is important, truth is more than propositional. Further, the more-than-propositional character of truth is crucial for understanding why truth matters, not simply in the academy, but throughout culture and society. Some readers will want to challenge the claim that truth is more than propositional. Others will want to explore the purported more-than-propositional character of truth. Still others will wonder whether truth matters in the ways that various authors suggest. The contributors to this volume welcome all such readers to join our conversation, for we believe that, like truth, dialogue about truth truly matters.
Lambert Zuidervaart
1 See Hendrik Hart, Johan van der Hoeven, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Rationality in the Calvinian Tradition (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983).
2 See the essays selected from these quadrilateral conferences in Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen, and Richard J. Mouw, eds., Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989); Sander Griffioen and Jan Verhoogt, eds., Norm and Context in the Social Sciences (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990); Brian J. Walsh, Hendrik Hart, and Robert E. VanderVennen, eds., An Ethos of Compassion and the Integrity of Creation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995); Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen, eds., The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and John H. Kok, ed., Ways of Knowing in Concert (Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, 2005). Strictly speaking, the conferences were “trilateral” until Dordt College became a co-sponsor for the first time in 1995 and hosted the next such conference in 1998.