The Truth of Others

This book offers an account of ten crucial moments in the history of ideas, which represent ten key moments of the discovery of pluralism. From the Indian emperor Ashoka to Origen and from Nicola Cusano to Las Casas, Montaigne, Lessing, giants who opened the way to the thought of tolerance, challenging the dogma of a unique truth dictated by authority, followed in this reconstruction by other glowing thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Horace Kallen, Margaret Mead, and Jacques Dupuis. These protagonists, each in their own way, battled against monism for the respect of differences and for the knowledge of otherness. This kind of hall of fame of pluralist thinkers ends with the most important figure of the pluralism of values, Isaiah Berlin, of whom an unpublished interview appears here for the first time in English. The volume is unique in this two-thousand-year-old variety of voices gathered under the denominator of cultural pluralism that they embody in the deepest andmost challenging sense, often at the limits and beyond the limits of heresy. It is of great value and interest to scholars and students of theoretical, moral, political philosophy, sociology, comparative studies, comparative literature, religious diversity, religious studies, anthropology, and all those interested in the history of tolerance. 

Giancarlo Bosetti is the head of Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, the association he created in 2004 with Nina zu Fürstenberg, and Reset, a cultural magazine, he founded in 1993 with Norberto Bobbio and a group of liberal-socialist intellectuals. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is also currently a columnist for the Italian daily La Repubblica. With a degree in philosophy, he has been adjunct professor at the University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre. Among his books Il legno storto, Cinque idee per ripensare la sinistra, Marsilio 1991, La lezione di questo secolo, with Karl Popper, Marsilio 1992. (The Lesson of This Century, Routledge 1997), Also with Karl Popper, Cattiva maestra televisione, Marsilio 1994, translated in several languages. Cattiva maestra. La rabbia di Oriana Fallaci e il suo contagio, Marsilio 2005, Spin. Trucchi e tele-imbrogli dellea politica, Marsilio 2007. Il fallimento dei laici furiosi. Come stanno perdendo la scommessa contro Dio, Rizzoli 2009. This is the English translation of his latest book: La verità degli altri, La scoperta del pluralismo in dieci storie, Bollati-Boringhieri 2019.