Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. Patreon.com slash philosophize this,

Philosophical writing on Substack et Philosophies This on there. I hope you love the show today.

So as you no doubt noticed when you saw the title of this podcast, there's going to be an episode

about the philosophy of lying. What were the thoughts of some of the greatest philosophers who

have ever lived about lying?

And what are their thoughts on whether it's a good thing for people to do or not? Now, for some people, this may seem like there's a really obvious answer to it. Why even talk about any of this stuff? But I think this is a good example of something where philosophy can deepen the way that you see the world by taking a minute to look at some of the less common sense ways of thinking about it. So I think it's worth noting here at the very start of this a fairly typical way that people

like to think about lying. There's no doubt going to be plenty of people listening to this

that assume a few different things about it. That what a lie is is when somebody knowingly makes

a false statement trying to deceive someone else. That lying is deeply wrong at its core, that I live my life,

99.9% of the time not telling lies like this, and that as a general principle, living in alignment

with the truth about the world, is clearly superior to having a view of anything that's based on

stuff that is false. I mean, what kind of person would you have to be to not want to be living

in the truth,

this person might ask? And these may seem like very reasonable assumptions to make about how we go through life. But again, I want to start this episode by using the work of some philosophers to introduce a healthy level of doubt, even a joyous level of doubt, into these otherwise very common ways of looking at things. And the first thing that needs to be questioned, I think, is this idea that the truth is something that is always superior to a falsehood

in every situation. Is that something that most people actually believe in when they say it?

Well, of all people, the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche actually talks about this idea at multiple

points throughout his work. The way he sees it, this is one of those idols that he smashes from the history of Western philosophy. He says

the philosophers have essentially always done their work, just assuming that better human

thought is always going to be centered around getting closer and closer to the truth.

But he points out how, even if you just think about that statement a little bit, the fact

that a belief is

false is not automatically an argument against it.

...