Truth and Historicity

Richard Campbell elucidates the concept of truth by tracing its history: from the ancient Greek idea that truth is timeless, unchanging, and free from all relativism, up to the seventeenth-century crisis which led to the collapse of that idea, and then on through the emergence of historical consciousness to the existentialist, sociological, and linguistic approaches of our own time. He gives a scholarly but vivid and economical exposition of the views of a remarkablywide range of thinkers, always showing how their ideas engage with our contemporary concerns. He argues that current problems with truth arise from the way differing past conceptions continue to resound in our contemporary use of the word, and suggests that we must formulate a new conception oftruth, compatible with awareness that through our actions we constitute who we are - with awareness of our own historicity.