Truth

18 Dec, 2014 100 Philosophy

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of truth. Pontius Pilate famously asked: what is truth? In the twentieth century, the nature of truth became a subject of particular interest to philosophers, but they preferred to ask a slightly different question: what does it mean to say of any particular statement that it is true? What is the difference between these two questions, and how useful is the second of them?

Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Simon Blackburn 4 episodes
    Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities
  • Jennifer Hornsby No other episodes
    Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
  • Crispin Wright No other episodes
    Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, and Professor of Philosophy at New York University

Reading list

  • Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate
    Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2005) Google Books →
  • Truth: A Guide
    Simon Blackburn (Oxford University Press, 2007) Google Books →
  • Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed
    Simon Blackburn (Penguin, 2006) Google Books →
  • Truth
    Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (eds) (Oxford University Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • Truth as One and Many
    Michael P. Lynch (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b04v59gz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v59gz

Auto-category: 100 (Philosophy and psychology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. What is truth?