The advent of modern science and technological society generated not only a new method for ascertaining the truth of nature, but new conceptions of nature, reason, and truth. This seminar will consider the ‘fate of truth’ in the light of this transformation. Reflecting philosophically and theologically on the meaning and history of truth, we will take special care to consider how a mechanistic ontology alters our understanding of truth, the means of attaining it, and our desire to seek it. Reading for the course will draw from such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, and Heidegger.
Selected Texts
Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, Vol. I: Truth of the World.
Allan Bloom (trans.), The Republic of Plato.
Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle.
Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will.
Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate I.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon.
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge.
William James, Pragamatism and the Meaning of Truth.
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Faculty

Michael Hanby
Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science
Dr. Hanby is author of No God, No Science?: Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Wiley-Blackwell 2013) which reassesses the relationship between the doctrine of creation, Darwinian evolutionary biology, and science more generally. He is also author of Augustine and Modernity (Routledge 2003).
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