DESCRIPTION: Paul Weingartner (born 1931) is an Austrian philosopher and science theorist. He studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at the University of Innsbruck. Until his retirement in 1999, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Salzburg. From 1972, he was director of the Institute for Philosophy of Science at the International Research Centre in Salzburg. The text in question is one of two published by the Austrian philosopher in SPCh. It is a transcript of a lecture given at a scientific meeting of the Department of Logic at ATK on 29 May 1985 (translated by Prof. Edward Nieznański). In it, the author addresses the issue of truth in contemporary philosophy. "The question “What is truth?” may lead us to treat “truth” as some kind of individual object. Or it may lead us to take the expression “What is truth?” in the same way as the question “What is man?”, as a question about the essence of truthfulness. Both approaches are historically ill-founded and, in fact, useless. By “historically ill-founded” we mean here the fact that philosophers who created the science of essence (such as Aristotle) and who professed and supplemented it (such as Thomas Aquinas) have quite different views on this point. (...) The question “What is meant by ‘truth’?” assumes in advance the unproven assumption that the expressions “true”, “truth”, “truthfulness” are categorical expressions corresponding to full-fledged concepts. Here, however, it should be noted that “truth”, “true” and “truthfulness” are not categorial expressions (expressions with a high degree of semantic independence) such as “Goethe”, “father” or “green” (pp. 216-217).
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