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?

→ Play 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 →

Related episodes

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?