When we discuss how we’re living in a post-truth era, it’s simply an acknowledgment of a certain inevitability. Whereas guardians of good taste once decided which texts and authors could be thrust into the public eye, those barriers have fallen away — everyone is now empowered to trumpet their thoughts to the world. However, because the World is so complex and opaque, it quickly devolves into an echo chamber and a filter bubble. Thus, it’s only among like-minded people that you can convince yourself that your own Worldview corresponds to reality—and that all those not in agreement have succumbed to some ideology, or even worse: Conspiracy Theories. While society reflexively responded to the public sphere’s structural change by establishing professional fact-checkers and disinformation experts, the fundamental philosophical question of how to maintain universally binding truth has largely remained un-illuminated. This was precisely our reason for asking Justin McBrayer to converse with us—armed with the pathos of Truth and the episteme of ancient Philosophy, he has confronted the new circumstances without resorting to general cultural criticism.
Justin McBrayer teaches Philosophy, Epistemology, and Ethics. at Fort Lewis College in Colorado. He writes a blog and, in addition to publishing Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation, writes for various media outlets (including the New York Times, Quillette, and Philosophy Now).
Justin McBrayer has published
Related Content
Talking to ... Catherine Liu
Imagining the Boomer world straying into suffocating moralism during the Pop Revolution would have seemed like a grotesque, if not outright ridiculous, mind game. Actually, it is a first-order puzzlement how such a terror of virtue could take hold of our political discourse and institutions. It is precisely this question that cultural theor…
Talking to ... Megan Gafford
The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange, even dark question emergin…
Talking to ... Wilfred Reilly
That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but it’s strange in a culture that declares science and objectivity its highest values. In this context, Wilfred Reilly’s work is enlightening in an old-fashioned sense: a political scientist undertakes the task of comparin…
