It is often thought that the notion that truth consists in correspondence with the facts goes back to antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, although past philosophers discussed the nature of truth in significant detail and with considerable philosophical sophistication, our understanding of past theories of truth is surprisingly limited and we lack a clear idea of how philosophical accounts of truth developed in later antiquity or in the Arabic and Latin medieval traditions.
This project offers a focused and systematic study of philosophical conceptions of truth in antiquity and the Middle Ages, which aims to explain the origins, motivations, and challenges faced by philosophical conceptions of truth in this period. It combines a focus on traditional metaphysical concerns (such as the nature of facts, correspondence, or whether some alternative account of truth rather than truth as correspondence is to be preferred) with a formal logical and semantic approach which examines how theories of truth were revised in the light of semantic paradoxes such as liar paradoxes (e.g. ‘this sentence is not true’, which, if true, is false, and if false, is true) and future contingents (e.g. ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow’, which seems to raise several difficulties whether we treat it as true, false, or neither true nor false).
The result of this project will be a better understanding of philosophical theorizing about several central metaphysical, logical, and semantic issues across the Greek, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions and a appreciation of the relations between these philosophical traditions.
