The first of twenty-five unpublished volumes dedicated to the discipline comes out on 18 November with the newspaper. We start with an essay by Diego Marconi
The dialogue between the arrested Jesus and Pilate, reported in the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, ends with the famous question of the Roman governor of Judea, addressed more to himself than to his interlocutor, or perhaps to everyone and no one: What is the truth? ?. The question remains open, Pilate turns his back on the prisoner and goes out to face the crowd who demand (and obtain) his condemnationalthough the Roman official claims that he has not found any reason to issue a sentence.
It is not a paradox to state that this scene can symbolically condense the parable that the concept of truth, on which the volume today on newsstands with the Corriere focuses, has traveled in the span of time ranging from ancient Greece to the present day, on which the philosophical tradition has never ceased to question. We thus passed from the belief that there was an absolute truth, which human beings could hardly come to know, to the current situation often defined as post-truthor the affirmation of truths that are accepted because they like it, regardless of the facts and conclusions of the experts (one example among all: the belief of Trump’s supporters in the assault on the Capitol in Washington that he was the real winner of the elections, whose real outcome had been altered by a robbery by the Democratic Party).
According to the most widespread etymology, the Greek word for truth, altheiawould consist of a negation (the initial privative alpha) and the root of the verb lanthno, which means to hide, to conceal: the truth would therefore be that which is not hidden, that which cannot be concealed. However, from the very beginning it was understood that this it did not necessarily imply that the truth is self-evidentbecause the decisive point does not lie in the truth itself – admitted that it exists, as Pilate would seem to doubt – but in the ability of human beings to grasp it and in the ways in which to be able to do so.
As a famous myth of Plato tells us, between us and the truth is the screen of our perceptions: these are like shadows that we see projected by the sun on the wall of a cave, that we delude ourselves are authentic; instead, we need to turn our backs on them, turn towards the light and thus grasp true realities (Plato’s ideas or, if you prefer, concepts).
For a long time, philosophy wondered how such knowledge of something could be achieved which, in any case, lies outside the mind (or intellect), the component of the human being responsible for processing the information received from the world external. The culmination of this attempt is represented by the famous definition of Saint Thomas (second half of the thirteenth century), that the truth is the adequacy of reality and understanding, an agreement or perfect match between the mind of the knower and the object of knowledge. In other words, to arrive at the truth it is sufficient to establish the correct relationship between thoughts and things: it is a question of what is defined as the ontological conception of truth, that is, which concerns the truth of things considered in themselves.
This idea of truth is called into question in the subsequent events of philosophy from two points of view: attention is concentrated, on the one hand, no longer on what the human mind can know, but on how it knows; on the other, on the way in which the known truth is expressed. So these are problems related to language and logic. From Descartes to Immanuel Kant until today, we reach the conviction that human beings cannot know external realities as such, but only by adapting them to certain characteristic structures of our mind, such as the concepts of space and time, or cause and effect. In itself, this does not mean at all that reality is not true or that truth does not exist, but only that we can know it exclusively from a subjective point of view, so to speak. Therefore, to move on to the second critical point, an expression such as: this real thing, will structurally contain a certain amount of arbitrariness, due to the specific characteristics not only of the speaker, but also of the historical and cultural context in which he finds himself formulating the own statements: before Galileo Galilei, no one would have doubted the truth of the statement according to which the Sun rotates around the Earth (after all, even today there are those who maintain that the Earth is flat).
Taking the consequences of this situation to extremes, which seem to dissolve the very concept of truth into relativism or pragmatism (truth is what works in a given context), contemporary philosophy is faced with unprecedented problemswhich however bring us back to the everlasting question: if what is not hidden is truth, will we be able to see it?
At the price of 6.90 euros. Each week the declensions of a keyword
It comes out on November 18th
on newsstands with the Corriere della Sera the book by Diego Marconi Befor sale at the price of e 6.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. This is the first release of the new series of unpublished volumes The words of philosophy, edited by Corrado Del B, Simone Pollo and Paola Rumore. In all, the series includes twenty-five volumes, which will be released every Friday until May 5, 2023. The purpose of the series is to offer Corriere readers a sort of philosophical lexicon including some of the most important concepts on which the greats have reflected over the centuries. masters of speculative thinking. As the editors observe in the general presentation that opens this first volume, many words of philosophy survive whoever introduced them into the philosophical lexicon: subsequent thinkers and thinkers continue to use them, integrating them with others and sometimes innovating them in their meaning. They are the words that allow us to indicate and address recurring philosophical problems, which resist the passage of time. Therefore, each book tells the story of the word: the origins of the question, the evolution of the word, or how that concept has been treated by philosophers and schools over the centuries, and finally the perspectives of the current debate. The second title in the series The words of philosophy To be by Edoardo Acotto: to be released on newsstands on November 25, always at the same price as the other subsequent volumes. Followed by: Pietro Montani, Beauty (December 2); Eugenio Lecaldano, Bene (December 9); Philip Magni, Freedom (December 16).
November 17, 2022 (change November 17, 2022 | 20:22)
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