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Wolfgang KÜNNE Conceptions of Truth CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 2003 Preface
This book is organized around a set of conceptual questions about truth which are charted in the introductory chapter, and it argues for what I take to be the most reasonable answers. It is partly due to my philosophical upbringing in Gadamer's Heidelberg, I suppose, that the history of philosophical reflections on the keyquestions I have selected will play a far larger role in these pages than it does in books on truth from the pen of other analytical philosophers. I am deeply convinced that, as Strawson once put it, 'the progress of philosophy, at least, is dialectical: we return to old insights in new and, we hope, improved forms'. A more specific reason why I have gone to some lengths to trace answers to mykey questions is that I cannot help thinking that nowadays too many analytical philosophers neglect even the English classics of their own tradition. (As the reader will soon notice, I take this tradition to have originated already in the early nineteenth century in Prague, in the heart of what my Anglophone colleagues tend to call 'the Continent'.) I hope that, as a result of my scholarlyambitions, this book will also serve as a reliable guide to the vast literature, both 'ancient' and contemporary, on its topic(s). As to the questions I shall go into, a confession at the outset might spare my prospective readers at least one disappointment: I have nothing enlightening to say about, let alone to contribute to, the debate on the semantic antinomies. Bracketing this deep problem about truth,apart from a few asides and a brief guide to the literature, might well be the most glaring of the omissions from which this book suffers. (But then, there is also something to be said in favour of not entering this arena: in antiquity, at least one philosopher died prematurely because he had worried too much about the 'Liar'.) The book is based on courses of lectures, and I have deliberatelyretained some features of those lectures: the use of tables and flow charts, a certain amount of rhetorical emphasis and recapitulation, the prodigality of examples, and even one or two serious attempts at making a joke. I hope all this will make for greater readability. The very rich supply of sometimes fairly extensive quotations is meant to give the reader a chance to assess my interpretations ofother philosophers on the spot. The book has been long in the making. Various earlier versions of my lectures were delivered at my home university. The first (more or less) English versions of my Hamburg lectures were presented in the mid-1990s in Oslo and in Venice. It was on those occasions that I began thinking end p.vii that it might be worthwhile to transform my lectures into a book. Materialfrom what are now the two final chapters was used in 'Simple Truth and Alethic Realism', which was my Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture in Oxford in May 1998. Parts of the penultimate draft of this book formed the text of the Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Lectures which I delivered at Oxford in Hilary Term 1999. Drafts of many sections of this book were read as occasional papers in Berlin, Bertinoro,Bielefeld, Fribourg, Heidelberg, Kirchberg, London, Munich, New York, Oldenburg, Oxford, Padua, Reading, Saarbrücken, San Marino, Siena, Toruń, Zielona Góra, and, most recently, at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge. Many of the questions and objections of my audiences have contributed greatly to the clarification of my thoughts. I am indebted to my students in Hamburg for much feedback over theyears, especially to Simon Dähnhardt, David Filip, Ben Höfer, Miguel Hoeltje, Niels Kröner, Vincent Müller, Michael Oliva-Cordoba, Stefanie Richter, Severin Schröder, Christian Stein, Armin Tatzel, Christian Tielmann, Elisabeth Wienberg, and above all, to Benjamin Schneider. I am also grateful to Maik Sühr, who helped prepare the manuscript for the publisher. I consider myself lucky that, many years...