        1. Radhakrishnan is a mystic philosopher. His philosophy was born of his own religious experiences as well as the mystic experiences of seers belonging to different religions. There is no philosophy for him without religious experience. The religious sense may be absent in most people but this does not invalidate its truth. Religious experience alone can reveal the greatest eternal truths to humanity.

        2. Intellect gives us superficial knowledge, intuition reveals the truth of it. Intuition gives the direct perception of things-in-themselves. Whereas intellect gives awareness of the properties of a thing, intuition gives knowledge of the thing itself. It reveals the nature of reality, the truth of things. the whole view of being unlike the intellect which gives only partial knowledge.
        Intuition is a state of consciousness in which the self gets completely identified with reality. It is knowledge of reality, as well as the feeling oneness with it. In intuition the subject does not remain the knower of reality, rather the known and the knower become identified in one. Intuition is experienced when the duality between the subject and the object culminates in this absolute oneness. In it the mind is fused with reality. It is awareness of the truth of things by identity. The object is seen as part of the self. The distinction object-subject ceases. Radhakrishnan agrees with Hegel: ”The rational is real and the real is rational”. In ecstasy reality and consciousness are one, thought and reality coalesce.
        Intuitive knowledge is the highest knowledge, it reveals the reality as a whole. It is incapable of growing, unlike intellectual knowledge which grows and develops. Intuitive knowledge is spontaneous and immediate. It comes to us as a vision. It carries its guarantee of authenticity within itself. Intuition is self-luminous and self-evident. This supreme ecstasy is a rare occurrence. Its lower forms are experienced by poets and artists. Intuition, in its highest form, is the proper of seers who have intuitive certainty of their experience. Their mystic experience carries with itself the validity which gives absolute certainty. These experiences having intrinsic validity there can be no question of truth and falsehood, if by truth and falsehood one understands correspondence with anything in the external world.
        Intuition has the character of revelation. It comes down as something unexpected. Those who receive these revelation are the chosen beings of God. The supreme intuitive consciousness can be traced in all human consciousness but it remains dormant except in a few.

        3. There are many types of intuition but the highest type is religious intuition. Religious intuition covers the whole life. It reveals the vision of God, it gives perception of the divine. The direct apprehension of God is real for these seers just as the perception of the external world is real for ordinary human beings. This intuition destroys the limited ego, it gives the experience of identity with existence. The religion of these seers is all comprehensive. Religions based on intellectual knowledge are closed, narrow and dogmatic. They follow definite systems of dogmas and rituals. True religion is a system of insight or religious experience. All religions are based on the revelations of the supreme mystic experience. But this intuitive experience is ineffable. It cannot be defined and expressed in concepts. Nonetheless these intuitions are variously interpreted in terms of tradition, culture, environment. Most of the time religious intuitions are experienced in the background of particular religious beliefs. The spiritual experience is always mixed up with the individual’s interpretations.
        Eastern philosophies and religions lay emphasis on the powers of intuition, while the West lays stress on the critical faculty of intelligence. The East is intuitive, the West is intellectual and rational. For the East behind and above the intellect there is the superior power of consciousness, called intuition, which discerns the truth, the thing-in –itself, the real. The vision of truth is obtained by direct intuition. One who has the explicit revelation of intuitive wisdom knows the truth of things, self and God. Whereas the intellect is an inadequate instrument which fails to gives us the knowledge of reality, intuition is the integral experience, the supreme consciousness through which the totality of truth is revealed.

* Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, An Idealist View of Life, ; Srivastava, R.S., Contemporary indian Philosophy, Munshiram Manoharlal Oriental Publishers, Delhi, 1965, 257-280

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RAJNEESH, Baghavan Shree *

(Indian spiritual teacher, 1931-1990)

Truth is not knowledge but personal experience, “seeing by oneself”’

        1. Truth can never be second-hand. It has to be a personal experience. Therefore it is neither knowledge nor belief.
        What one calls knowledge is most of the time only information, accumulation of data from various sources. This knowledge is always borrowed. It does not liberate, rather it creates new problems. It belongs to the past, it comes from outside, from others, from teachers, traditions, books, scriptures. This kind of knowledge gives theories of truth, not truth itself. Some identify this knowledge with belief and they are right. All beliefs are tricks on the mind, giving the feeling of knowing. It is easy and cheap to believe, for it does not involve personal commitment and responsibility. Belief and second-hand knowledge come from ignorance.
        Moreover no conception about absolute truth is possible because every conception is bound to be relative. The absolute transcends every conceptualisation; one cannot conceive it. We can live in it, we can be in it, but no intellectual conception is possible about it. All conceptions are bound to be erroneous. “I am not a philsopher” says Rajneesh, “I deny every type of philsophizing.” The truly religious mind is a mind that is not philosophizing about the truth. Philosophizing is a kind of mentation, the mind is working. And through the mind no contact with the absolute is possible. Only when the mind ceases, when thinking ceases, can we come into contact with truth. Where philsophical conceptions end, the absolute begins. The moment we begin to think about truth, truth is being lost. Truth can never become a word.

        2. There is another kind of knowledge, a genuine one, not second-hand but first-hand, which Rajneesh calls Wisdom. Wisdom is each person’s experiential, existential realisation of truth. It has nothing to do with the past but with the present. It is what we live and see, like innocent little children. Truth is very simple, it is untrue that is complex. “Unless you are like small children you will never enter the Kingdom of God.” That Wisdom is within the self. The Guru’s function is to help the individual to see by him/herself, not to make him/her believe in anything extraneous. His task is to dismantle all one’s beliefs so that one may be able to see. . This is how Buddha and Socrates understood their mission. These masters taught pÍople to be masters of themselves. They never said: “Believe in me because I said it”. But most people in search of truth want some one to hold their hand, tell them the truth, trace the path to follow. They search wrongly for a father or a mother figure. They have to accept that they are their own authority. Authority cannot come from anything other than one’s own personal realisation. If any one invokes the authority of some scriptures or traditions, he does so on the basis of his own authority. It is he who decides to give sciptures or traditions their authority.

        3. Truth is existential, and that means it has to be discovered again and again. It is totally individualistic and personal. What Buddha discovered or what Jesus preached can never become a universal truth. There is no universal truth , each one has to rediscover the truth. True religion is not a commodity of the market-place. It cannot be taught like scientific or philosophical truth. Authentic religious truth has no tradition, no past, it is not the product of indoctrination. It is an individual flowering, concerned with subjectivity. It has to be a truth for the individual person, an inner truth, not the truth of another or of a tradition. Only an inner truth gives certainty. All outer “truths” are uncertain, probable, mere beliefs. To speak of “absolute” truths is not only meaningless, it is also harmful because it creates fanatics. The word “absolute” has dragged the world into misery. All verbal truths are relative. Knowing this, you will be liberal, tolerant and compassionate.

* Rajneesh, Bhagvan Shree, The Eternal Quest, Orient Paper Backs, 1978, p.113-117;, 124-129, The Long, the Short and the All, Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi, 1979, p 53-60, The Book of Books, Vol.III, Rajneesh Foundation International, , Oregon, 1976, p. 1-61

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RAMAKRISHNA *

(Hindu mystic, 1836-1886)

“Truth is one, wise people speak of it in various ways”

The above quotation from the Vedas (“Ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti”) exemplifies well the great teaching of Ramakrishna on the essential oneness of all religions. The claim that they are all different paths leading to the same goal was not for Ramakrishna an intellectual generalization but the experience he alleged to have had through the performance of the disciplines of the various religions. He wanted people to understand that God can never be exhausted in any one religion. One can never say that God is this and this alone and nothing more. Still he taught that a believer must have faith and stay on his/her own path, while never thinking that his/her religion is the only path. That there are a multiplicity of religions and a multiplicity of ideals need not bewilder us. Each person sees God only through his/her own eyes. The God-realization which is all that matters is bound to be different from person to person, from culture to culture. Because of difference in time, place and persons, God has given us many religions. All faiths are paths but these faiths are not the goal, they are not God. The God-realization is possible by various methods, various ways and various religions. All these ways are capable to lead the goal; thus we should have respect for all of them.

Ramakrishna proclaims that all religions are true, that all religions are but different paths to Self-realization which is identical with God-realization. He liked to relate the parable of the pond that has many bathing points. Coming to one point, the Hindu says: I have brought jala; the Mohammedan comes from a different point and calls it pani; the Christian brings the same thing from another point and names it water. It is the same thing called by so many names. In the same way the Supreme Being has been variously described as Ishwar, Allah or God, different names for the same ultimate truth.

* Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna, New York, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942

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RAMANA MAHARSHI *

(Hindu sage and mystic, 1879-1950)

The supreme Truth is the truth of 'pure Awareness'

        Ramana Maharshi, a modern Hindu master of Advaita Vedanta - the Indian system of philosophy that endorses the view that the 'true being' within each one of us is the ultimate, sublime Reality or Brahman - taught a method of self-inquiry in which the seeker focuses continuous attention on the I-thought in order to find its source. What prevents one from reaching that source is the ego, which therefore must be destroyed in order to realize the truth.
        According to him, Jnâna - or the supreme knowledge - is given neither from outside nor from another person. It has to be realised by each and everyone in his own Heart. The jnâna Guru of everyone is none other than the Supreme Self that is always revealing its own truth in every heart through the being-conciousness 'I am, I am.' The real Guru is that Self-awareness, one's own true nature, the inner conciousness revealing the truth of existence.
        For Ramana truth cannot not be put into words, truth cannot be a concept or an idea, truth is beyond mind, beyond the horizontal plane of existence of apparent beginnings and ends. Thus his favourite method was his silent teaching, his preferred way to communicate truth. The only true and perfect knowledge being the stillness of pure Awareness, all other kinds of knowledge are base, trivial, ego-born conceptual clouds. To trust them is sheer foolishness, he declared. True religion for Ramana Maharshi is not speculating with the inconstant mind and endless speaking. True religion is the silence, the experience of deathless Being-Awareness-Bliss. The intricate maze of philosophy of different schools is said to clarify matters and reveal the Truth. But in fact they create confusion where no confusion need exist.
        To understand anything there must be the Self. The Self is obvious. Why not remain as the Self? What need to explain the non-self? The only Truth is that of the Self. People do not like even to hear of this Truth, whereas they are eager to know what lies beyond, about world, heaven and hell, immortality and reincarnation and other such 'mysteries'. In fact, there are no other truths than the supreme Truth, the Truth of Self-Awareness, abiding in the heart, not in the mind. All other knowledge is mere folly.

* Be As You Are : The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi , David Godman (Editor), published by Arkana (Penguin Books) , London, 1985

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RAMANUJA *

(Indian philosopher and theologian,1017-1137)

It is natural and inherent to thought to be true

Ramanuja’s metaphysical ideas owe a great deal to his understanding of human knowledge and its relation to reality. He models reality upon the pattern of ordinary human language and thought. All our judgments and categorical propositions are relational, and therefore real objects that exist outside the mind are always relational, never simple. Knowledge is always in and through differences, the perception of these distinctions is evidence enough that they correspond to reality. Ramanuja is an ultra-realist – some would say a naive realist - for believing in the absolute correspondence between thought and reality. The distinctions and relations established through judgments have an objective value. Thought and language being necessarily relational, the substance-attribute relations (aprithaksiddhi) are objectively describing reality.

Ramanuja’s ‘Visishtadvaita’ adopts the theory established by the Mimamsakas , that all knowledge is intrinsically valid, the doctrine called Svatah Pramanya or self-validity of all knowledge. It is natural and inherent to thought to be true. No adventitious support or evidence, no alien quality of excellence, is needed to vest knowledge with truth. Only falsity is brought about and cognized through such adventitious circumstances. Thought, when pure, is in rapport with reality. But thought can be sullied or distorted by falsifying adjuncts, then it misses the truth. Such falsification is made evident by it being contradicted by the rest of the body of knowledge. This principle implies, in relation to spiritual knowledge, that it necessarily carries validity unless it is subject to contradiction. This is a general epistemological principle developed and defended on a free and independent philosophical basis and rests on no dogmatic belief.

Scripture satisfies empirical standards. Its supremacy, its role as the revelation of the Supreme, is itself based upon its satisfactory fulfillment of the criterion of truth and validity settled by empirical intelligence. It satisfies its claim to truth by conforming to a standard that is not set up by itself.

According to naïve empiricism, the only knowledge that one can have is knowledge that one has gained by one\'s own experience. But unlike some proponents of naïve empiricism, Ramanuja does not restrict knowledge to that which can be gathered from the senses. The individual self (jiva) on Ramanuja\'s account is also capable of having a direct vision of transcendent entities, like Brahman. The character of the epistemic state in which one is acquainted with Brahman is a type of perception for Ramanuja.

*Bartley, C. J., The Theology of Rāmānuja: Realism and religion, London: Routledge Curzon, 2002

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RAMSEY, Frank *

The redundancy theory of truth.

        1. Ramsey’s theory presupposes the (controversial) assumption that all propositions have one of the two truth-values : true or false. Suppose we say: “The cat is on the mat”(p). If we make that statement it is because we believe that it is true that the cat is on the mat. Therefore “p” and “p is true” have the same truth-value, they are equivalent. It is therefore redundant and useless to add “is true” to “p”; it is sufficient to state “p”. We can say everything we want without the concepts of truth and falsity. Truth is affirmation and falsity is negation. To add “is true” is nothing more than a needless reaffirmation of the proposition. “True” or (“false”) is a useless predicate. Thus the philosophical and linguistic problems of truth evaporate.

        2. Many philosophers have not been satisfied with Ramsey’s claim that “is true” does not add anything to the meaning of statements. For instance, the redundancy theory cannot handle the problem raised by what are called “blind” ascriptions of truth. “All that Buddha said is true”, asserts one of his disciples who believes in him. He does not know all that Buddha said – he makes a “blind” assertion - but he has faith in Buddha. In such a case one cannot eliminate “is true” because there is no equivalence between “all that Buddha said” and “all that Buddha said is true”. The “is true” in this case adds something and that suggests that the predication of truth on what Buddha said is meaningful. In many other such cases there is much more in truth and falsity than mere affirmation and negation. A meaningful affirmative proposition is not necessarily true. Truth is more than mere assertion.
        Besides that, several critics of Ramsey have stressed that in saying that something is true one does do much more than “saying”. In most case the attribution of truth to a proposition fulfills a performative function so that to say that a statement is true is to endorse it, to make it one’s own and express one’s agreement. Hence to say that something is true, adds something to the original statement. (See Austin and Strawson)

* See Jonhson, Lawrence, Focussing on Truth, Routledge, London, 1992, p.74-76; Scruton, Roger, Modern Philosophy, Mandarin paperback, London,1994, p.108-109

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RAND Ayn *

(Russian born American novelist and philosopher, 1905-1982)

Absolute truths can be known through human reasoning

        Ayn Rand is the founder of the “Objectivist movement”. “Objectivism” derives its name from the conception of knowledge and values as "objective," rather than as "intrinsic" or "subjective."
        This highly individualist philosophy is based on the following four principles: 1) Reality is objective and that implies that reality exists independent of man and that man cannot create his own reality but only perceive it. 2) Reason is man's only means of knowledge. Objectivists believe there is an Absolute Truth which can be known through human reasoning. They reject the subjectivist's belief that truth is a matter of personal opinion, as well as any form of skepticism, mysticism, and revealed truth. 3) Rational self-interest is the objective ethical code. Objectivism rejects altruism. 4) Laissez-faire capitalism is the objective social system. Objectivism rejects socialism and the welfare state.
        The Epistemology of Objectivism holds that the information provided to the mind by the senses is completely valid. It holds further that information is the foundation of all other knowledge. It asserts that man can form concepts, and that concepts are objective. It rejects the idea that concepts are the product of arbitrary decision by society, and the idea that concepts are created by a supreme being. It affirms that logic is man's means of concept formation/knowledge, and that truths are absolutes. Emotions and intuitions are not means of knowledge. Objectivism rejects skepticism (i.e., such ideas as that truth is inside your head; that there are no absolutes; that truths are all subjective) and mysticism (i.e., the idea, for example, that knowledge will be given to you by a supreme being without you having to reason).
        Rand distinguished between the unchangeable properties of the world (the "metaphysically given") and those things that man can create from that which exists in nature ("the man made"). Rand explained that, to create that which is man-made, man must first choose to perceive and discover that which is metaphysically given. Only on the basis of this knowledge is man able to learn how the things given in nature can be rearranged to serve his needs (which is his method of survival).

* For the New Intellectual: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, New York, New American Library, 1961

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RANK, Otto *

One cannot live with the truth, but only with illusions

        According to Otto Rank, a dissident of Freud’s Psychoanalytical Society, the primacy of the intellect which underlies the Freudian analytical therapy, must be abandoned. Self-knowledge that leads to constant awareness of the subject is the disturbing factor that blocks the flow of immediate experience and leads to neurotic self-restriction upon living. Knowledge that relentlessly strives after truth, separates consciousness from experience. Our seeking the truth in human motives for acting and thinking is destructive. One cannot live with the truth. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love, but inner illusions which first condition the outer. At the moment a man begins to search after truth, he destroys reality and his relation to it. The more he takes reality for truth, appearance as essence, the sounder and the better will he be. It is only in the displaced world of appearance that man can live happily. Unhappiness arises when he is driven by his intellectual pride, his will to truth, his greed to expose his reality as lies, appearance and falsehood.
        Hence the more a man can accept the appearance as reality, the more normal, healthy and happy he is. The neurotic unfortunately sees the falsities of reality and it is this insight that robs him of the illusions important for living. Psychologically the neurotic is much nearer to the actual truth than the others. But this is also the reason why he suffers and is a neurotic.

        Freud’s claim was to dispense with illusions but Rank explodes this view with his theory of truth and reality. He shows the insoluble conflict in which psychoanalysis itself is caught. Freudian psychoanalysis wants to be theory and therapy at the same time. But this is an impossible task. Psychological analysis seeks truth, seeks insight into psychic processes and this works destructively. If psychology is also and more therapy than theory, it must offer the patient consolations and justifications that cannot be psychologically true. For if they are true, they cannot work therapeutically. Freud wants to know the final truth about man, he wants to reconcile the alienated to reality: but these intentions are incompatible.
        The neurotic, asserts Rank, fails in life because he wants to know too much truth about himself, whether he experiences this truth as guilt, incapacity for love, or feelings of gross inferiority. This “knowledge” is an incapacity for illusion, but illusion is essential for a happy life. Freud’s psychology of cognition must be replaced by a psychology of the will. Happiness is more important than truth; will is more essential than intellect.

* See Levi, Albert William, Philosophy and the Modern World, Indian University Press, Bloomington, 1970, p. 184-190

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RASCHKE C.A. *

(Contemporary American evangelical theologian)

Faithfulness defines the sphere of truth. Truth is the intimacy of the interpersonal.

    For Rashke, truth is in the sanctity of relationships. He comments on the Greek word alethiea. The English word truth and the word for marriage (“troth” or “betrothal”) have the same etymological links. The Koine Greek has a similar force. Aletheia is an “unveiling,” as a bride before her husband. Truth is the intimacy of the interpersonal. As in all intimate relationships, if one is “true” to the other, one is also faithful. Faithfulness defines the sphere of truth.     Raschke points out that Heidegger correctly identified one of the fundamental flaws in western philosophy and in particular western theology. The confusion of map for territory became institutionalized in the correspondence theory of truth. According to Heidegger, the syntax of language does not duplicate the structure of reality any more than a map reflects the territory. We should not confuse presence with representation.

    When we use certain lenses to view reality, the lenses themselves become part of our seeing. Like the old metaphor, rose colored glasses add a certain tint to every vista. The philosophical discourse of propositions is a rose colored glass that distorts and objectifies the God and His gospel. The God of the philosophers is a tame God. He won’t trouble us much, but neither can he save us.   When we can codify all the truth of Scripture into neat propositional statements, we may come to believe that we have all we need. Truth in that case is that which is expressed in a series of formuli.

    But to find the real truth we need to move from a purely rational perspective to a relational one. The implications for the Christian approach to Scripture is that one needs to move from a view of Scripture as truth to Scripture as vocative: it is the story of God’s self-revelation in history, the story of His covenant faithfulness, and His voice to us, calling for a faithful response. Raschke argues that propositional language is always flattened, confined to the third person. It is always “about” something else. Vocative language, however, requires the second person and expresses the “I-Thou” relation, which is the locus of faithfulness and truth. He wages war on propositions, insisting they can never be made into the touchstone of Christian truth, which is always personal and relational.

* Raschke Carl, The Next Reformation, Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, Baker Academic, 2004

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RATZINGER Joseph *

(German theologian and Pope Benedict XVI, b.1927)

Relativism denies the possibility of any objective truth

        Interreligious dialogue has become the central issue of modern theology and with it the question of truth. Ratzinger denounces the mistaken notion of dialogue which emphasizes not a search for objective and absolute truth, but a desire to put all religious beliefs on the same plane. Such dialogue gives rise to a "false idea of tolerance," which allows respect for other beliefs because it rejects the possibility of any objective truth.
        He emphasizes the dangers of relativism, which is for him the opposite of the idea of Truth and the belief that no truth exists that is superior to mere opinion. He deplores the present day tendency to label people who have a strong faith, based on Church teaching, as “fundamentalists”. He warns :”We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires”. Relativism is the greatest danger for contemporary theology. A false notion of tolerance and respect for the other seems to have imposed the idea of the equivalence of all religions. Nowadays the principle of tolerance and respect for the other is manipulated to such an extent that the content of each and every religion is placed on an equal footing. There is no objective and universal truth from the acknowledged assumption that the Absolute has revealed itself under innumerable forms, all true in their own way. This false idea of tolerance goes hand in hand with loss of the concept of absolute Truth. Ratzinger deplores the fact that much of present day thought has no or little concern for the problem of truth.
        Thus as a frontal assault on the very possibility of objective truth, relativism is by far the most destructive intellectual current of our times. Ratzinger, in concert with a very strong current in R.C. Church tradition, is insisting that there is an absolute truth, and the pinnacle expression of that truth came in the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Church must have the courage to proclaim that absolute truth.
        The relativism that Ratzinger attacks is the regulative principle that all thought is and must remain subjective. What he defends against such relativism is the contrary regulative principle, namely, that each human subject must continue to inquire incessantly, and to bow to the evidence of fact and reason. Ratzinger wishes to defend the imperative of seeking the truth in all things, the imperative to follow the evidence.

* Ratzinger, Jospeh, Truth and Tolerance, Ignatius press, USA, 2004

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RAWLS John *

Justice is not founded on truth but on ‘overlapping consensus’

John Rawls’ “political liberalism” intends to do away with any metaphysical account of the truth of moral judgements and their validity. It replaces truth by ‘reasonableness’ as a standard of correctness and does not want to go beyond that. Rawls wants to substitute ‘political liberalism’ in place of ‘philosophical liberalism’ in order to enable the exclusion of all metaphysical premises. According to him political philosophy has nothing to gain from the truth and validity of fundamental shared moral convictions. ‘Political liberalism’ sees metaphysics as a dispensable luxury rather than a prerequisite of a theory of human rights. Metaphysics is unhelpful stumbling block to the ‘overlapping consensus’ that Rawls advocates. The wide array of metaphysical views and concepts of truth that encumber the world of philosophical speculations is the major obstacle to such a consensus. His ‘political liberalism’ claims metaphysical ‘impartiality’ – that is to say it claims to elaborate the principles of political justice without relying on any disputable philosophical doctrine. Only an ‘overlapping consensus’ can be the space where diverse philosophical and religious doctrines can find common ground. The fundamental question for him is to determine how citizens, who are deeply divided in religious and philosophical doctrines, can still maintain a just and stable democratic society. His conception of justice is ‘political’, he claims, and not moral or philosophical. It does not argue for the truth or metaphysical validity of its grounding principles. Rawls’ concept of justice is derived from the political culture and tradition of liberal democratic societies. Following Kant’s concept of categorical imperative, Rawls sees the ‘political’ conception of justice as ‘intuited’, pertaining to the human intellect as self-evident, therefore in no need of other justification than itself. It is self-validating, not founded on metaphysical validation or philosophical concept of truth.
The position of Rawls is based on a distinction between what is ‘true’ and what is ‘reasonable’. What is reasonable for him has no metaphysical basis. It is unnecessary, he claims, to try to ground maxims of practical reason – which is the content of his ‘overlapping consensus’ – in an order of reality beyond itself. He does not criticize metaphysical accounts of the truth of moral judgements but claims that ‘reasonableness’ can do without any concept of metaphysical truth, being only a matter of ‘overlapping consensus’.

* Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1993

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REICHENBACH Hans *

(German philosopher of science, 1891-1953)

We are all gamblers: we have to content ourselves with probabilities

        Hans Reichenbach, a leading representative of the Vienna circle of logical positivism, made important contributions to the analysis of probabilistic reasoning in the field of science and philosophy. Throughout his career he was concerned to elaborate a cogent and consistent empiricism based on a theory of probability.
        Reichenbach argues that truth is unattainable, and that we have to content ourselves with probability. The attempt to find a basis of certain truth by appealing to the verification of sentences that refer immediately to what is given (‘protocol-sentences’) is a mistaken one. Truth and falsity are ideal limiting cases, and between these lies a range of probability. The weight of a proposition is the degree of its probability. Propositions are neither true nor false but more or less probable, and this is something that can be statistically calculated.
        There is no certainty in any knowledge about the world, because knowledge of the world involves prediction of the future and any statement concerning the future is a ‘gamble’. We are all gamblers, the man of science as well as the religious man. But there is a big difference between their wagers. The scientist proceeds from observed phenomena by induction to statements having a determinate weight, but in the case of the religious man, it would be hard to show that his statements have any weight at all. The weight of a proposition is the degree of its probability. To believe that the sun will rise tomorrow is a pretty safe bet but to believe that God has revealed himself in history has just no comparable weight. Thus for Reichenbach, if science does not offer us truth, it does show us the best wagers. It has been rightly pointed out that his argument for scientific induction bears an astonishing resemblance to Pascal’s wager argument for religion.

* Reichenbach, Hans, The Theory of probability, London, Cambridge University press, 1949

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REID, Thomas *

(Scottish philosopher, 1710-1796)

The criterion of truth is found in the common sense of man

        Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish school of common sense, placed the criterion of truth in the common sense of man. He insisted that our knowledge is based on principles which are evident and are recognized as such by the common sense of man; from these principles man derives a body of primordial "truths of common sense" which serve as a sort of general fund of knowledge for mankind. Reid believes that common sense-the truths about reality that naturally occur among all human beings-should be the measure of the truth of all philosophical assertions.
        Reid was critical of Hume's skepticism and Berkeley's immaterialism which according to him led to untenable results. He took the position that there was something radically wrong with philosophy in general if such conclusions were possible. He also challenged the philosophical skepticism implicit in Cartesianism. Descartes sought certitude through universal doubts, but Reid condemned this method as artificial. He stated the evidence of common sense to reject Descartes'assumption that an individual should be capable of doubting the outer world through introspection. For Reid the "self-evident is the province, and the sole province, of common sense."
        Reid sees common sense as a body of self-evident principles which guide our judgment in the normal course of life. These self-evident principles are not acquired through critical reflection - they are not, strictly speaking, knowledge, but instead, instinct-like beliefs, innate to human nature, which make knowledge possible and which no human beings can deny.
        For him, philosophy arises from common sense. Philosophers must take common sense as their point of departure. The denial of the self (Hume) and the view that there is no material world (Berkeley) are two examples of 'the metaphysical lunacy' of thinkers who have rejected the common sense principles as the basis for philosophical truth-searching. Reid wanted to show that philosophy grows out of common sense, and that common sense taken in its strict meaning is a kind of foreshadowing of philosophy proper. Any philosophy, therefore, that strays very far from common sense is suspect. In contradicting the basic certitudes of common sense, it is guilty of denying reality itself, and on this point common sense can pass judgment on it.

* Reid, Thomas, An inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Baruch A.Brody, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1969

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RENOUVIER Charles *

(French philosopher, 1815-1903)

The assertion of truth is always a kind of belief,
a free personal act of faith

For Renouvier, the philosopher of personalism and freedom, all knowledge depends upon a “will to believe.” The premiËre vÈritÈ is a free personal act of faith. Renouvier is more concerned with subjective certitude than objective truth.
His discussion of certitude is very closely bound up with his treatment of the problem of freedom and his attitude to belief and knowledge. He considers it advisable to approach the problem of certitude by considering its opposite, doubt. He states the circumstances under which we do not doubt and that is, "when we see, when we know, when we believe." Owing to our liability to error (even seeing is not believing, and we frequently change our minds even about our ‘seeing’), it appears that belief is always involved, and more correctly: ‘we believe’ that we see, ‘we believe’ that we know. Belief is a state of consciousness involved in a certain affirmation of which the motives show themselves as adequate. Certitude arises when the possibility of an affirmation of the contrary is entirely rejected by the mind. Certitude thus appears as a kind of belief. For all knowledge, Renouvier maintains, involves an affirmation of will. "Every affirmation in which consciousness is reflective is subordinated, in consciousness, to the determination to affirm." Our knowledge, our certitude, our belief, whatever we prefer to call it, is a construction not purely intellectual but involving elements of feeling and, above all, of will. Even the most logically incontrovertible truth are sometimes unconvincing. This is because certitude is not purely intellectual; it is une affaire passionnelle. Renouvier here approaches the pragmatist position. He would agree with Maine de Biran who had suggested the substitution of Volo, ergo sum in place of the inadequate Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum. As all demonstration is deductive in character and so requires existing premises, we cannot expect the premiËre vÈritÈ to be demonstrable. From the will to create certainty, we must turn to the will to create beliefs, for no evidence or previous truths exist for us. The Cogito, ergo sum really does not give us a starting point because the thinking self is always preceded by the willing self. "I refuse," says Renouvier, "to follow the work of a knowledge which would not be mine. I accept the certainty of which I am the author." Thus the premiËre vÈritÈ is a free personal act of faith. Certainty in philosophy or in science reposes ultimately upon freedom and the consciousness of freedom.

* Renouvier, Charles, Le Personalisme, Verlag, Paris, 1903

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RESCHER Nicolas *

(American philsopher, b. 1928)

     Our “knowledge” is no more than our best estimate of the truth of things.

Rescher accepts the correspondence of knowledge to fact as providing the best definition of truth, but finds it can provide no workable criterion for determining which of our beliefs are true. In contrast, coherence cannot provide the meaning of truth, but it can be the arbiter of factual claims. Coherence presupposes logical consistency, so logical truth is justified on principally pragmatic grounds.                                                                                                                                                                         He is more concerned with presenting coherence as a dynamic theory as to how we can sort out our beliefs to approximate the truth than to consider what the idealized final result might look like. This involves “degrees of truth” or, more precisely, degrees with respect to what we are justifiably warranted in claiming to be true. His main contentions are as follows:

1. Given that “the real truth” is guaranteed only by ideal coherence – by optimal coherence with a perfected data base that we do not have, rather than by apparent coherence with the data base we actually have in hand – we have no categorical assurance of the actual correctness of our coherence-guided inquiries, and no unqualified guarantee that their deliverances provide “the real truth” that we seek in matters of empirical inquiry.

    2. The history of science shows that our “discoveries” about how things work in the world secured through scientific coherentism constantly require adjustment, correction, replacement.

    3. We cannot say that our coherence-grounded inductive inquiries provide us with real (definitive) truth, but just that they provide us with the best estimate of the truth that we can achieve in the circumstances at hand.

    4. Our “knowledge” is no more than our best estimate of the truth of things. Lacking the advantage of a God’s eye view, we have no access to the world’s facts save through the mediation of (potentially flawed) inquiry. All we can do is to do the best we can in the cognitive state of the art to estimate “the correct” answer to our scientific questions.

    5. We must pursue the cognitive enterprise of our sciences amid the harsh realities and complexities of an imperfect world. In deliberating about the truth of our scientific claims, as elsewhere, the gap between the real and the ideal must be acknowledged.

*Nicholas Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth, Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy, Clarendon Press, 1973. 374 pp.

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RICOEUR Paul *

(French philosopher, 1913- )

The three orders of truth: scientific, ethical and existential.
The problem of the historical plurality of truth.

        1. There are two types of truths: the lazy, already established truths to acknowledge and the inventive, creative truths to conquer.
        - When the order of things is already structured and mapped, and when the rules of language are well established, then knowledge and truth are mere acknowledgments, repetitions, much like taking photographs. Truth is the recognition of what is, the correspondence and agreement of mind and fact. The proposition that ”The wall is white” is the passive acknowledgment of what is. Ricoeur calls such propositions the expressions of lazy, uninteresting truths belonging to fields which are already mapped and well known. Of course one has to ascertain that the mapping is satisfactory, not erroneous and that there is sufficient guarantees that the established order is right.
        - However most of the time our mind is called to structure the reality. No order is yet established, it is an unknown , unexplored ground. Here there is room for investigation, room for man’s mental activity in search of truth. Here knowledge is not mere recognition but creation of meaning. It is the field of interesting truths.

        2. We are constantly called to structure reality on three different levels, which determine three types or orders of truths : the scientific, the ethical and the existential.
        - Scientific truth. Science structures reality and establishes a type of truth that depends on its method of verification. Truth in science is solidary of the process of verification. Verification is the measure , the criterion of truth. Science presents itself as the exemplar of all truths. However the temptation is to ‘dogmatize’ and reduce all truths to scientific truth ,i.e. the empirically verifiable. The scientific activity must be replaced in its context of moral responsability and human existence. Science is not the totality of knowledge. Scientific truth must be open to the ethical and existential higher sphere of life. Submission to scientific truth is indispensable but it must be followed by the call into question of scientific truth, and the admission that it is challenged by the higher order of ethical truth.
        - Ethical truth. Human beings find a moral order or structure to which they conform their behaviour. They submit to that order just as the scientists submit to their own. But like the scientists too they are called to question the moral order in being open to the higher level of existential truth. To avoid the narrow dogmatisation of rigid ethical truths they remain open to the highest level of existential truth.
        - Existential truth of the subjective self. Here too the two movements of submission and questioning must take place for a healthy pursuit of truth.
        The three levels – scientific, ethical and existential - must communicate with each other. One particular level of truth de-humanizes if it is not related and open to the other. No area of truth can be dealt in isolation. Every level is problematic, there is questioning and need for further structuring at every stage. Each order of truth includes the truth of submission and the truth of questioning.

        3. Truths seem to be plural, as is evidenced by the above mentioned distinction of the three levels of truths and also by the pluriformity of truth within each level. But the unity of truth, asserts Ricoeur, is “a requirement of our reason, and a passion of the will”. We want unity but that formal unity is empty. Of course, one could speak of an eschatological unity of truth, but not more. In the meantime we have to accept the situation of pluriformity and not want to impose the unity of truth. Many want to close the circle too quickly. This is the historical lie of the one truth imposed by authority and violence in politics and religions. The greatest temptation of the lying mind is to contaminate the search for truth by its exigency of unity and to make the false step of the total to the ‘totalitarian’. The religious totality and the political totality pervert the honest search for truth. This phenomenon manifests the amazing solidarity between totality, lie and power: the total truth imposed by force is a lie. The history of theology, in particular, reveals how the task of achieving the unity of truth coincides with the sociological phenomenon of authority. Theology includes necessarily a character of authority. Authority is a fundamental character of Revelation. The Word of God is authority on personal and social life. In theology the word “dogma” means truth grounded in authority. But then the temptation is to substitute the authority of the Word by the authority of man over man, specially when the first is used to authenticate the second. Ricoeur calls it the “snare of clerical passion” for authority, all the more perfidious that it claims to serve the truth. According to him, the guilt of clerical violence has too often accompanied the history of Christian Churches. It has engendered all forms of lies and dissimulations, used today also by political dictatorships. The Galileo incident is a summary of the permanent tragedy of the authoritarian truth of religion and the libertarian truth of science. Whereas the theological pathos is the pathos of authority, the philosophical pathos is the pathos of freedom. Theology is obedience to established truth, philosophy is audacity in search of truth.
        The lesson of history for contemporary theology is that the breakdown of the violent unity of truth is good and beneficial because it produces a greater awareness of the various levels of truths. The Word of God is better understood when it is not confused with the word of science, cosmology and ethics. It belongs to another order of truth. The traditional enforced unity of truth collapses with the modern awareness of a plurality of levels of truth. It is not clear to us now how all the planes of truth can be harmoniously synthezised but it is certain that “clerical” and other syntheses that make violence to truth are no longer permissible. If there exists a harmony of all truths, it is to be found at an end not yet in view. The unity of truth is “eschatological”. Our time is one of struggle and debate, discernment and patience. At present the unity of truth is an illusion, truth is plural.

        4. There is an apparent contradiction between the ideal of one truth and the history of multiple philosophies. We all aspire for the fulfilment of knowledge in unity and immutability. The opposition of philosophical systems in history is a disturbing phenomenon that fosters an attitude of skepticism. How should one reconcile the philosophical ideal of the one truth with the historical plurality of contradictory philosophical systems? The cheap way to face the problem is either to adopt the ‘eclectic’ solution according to which Truth is regarded as the additions of all scattered pieces of truth found in history here and there or to ratify some sort of Hegelian solution in which the histories of philosophy are subjectively interpreted as converging towards one’s own philosophy.
        One could avoid scepticism in understanding the history of philosophical systems not as various solutions of the same immutable problems but as discoveries of new problematics requiring radically new solutions. Great philosophers are those who have questioned in a different ways that their predecessors. However this interpretation of the history of philosophy would reduce it to a succession of singular discontinuous philosophies that have nothing in common. History as development and progress vanishes, the one truth being multiplied is denied. Philosophies are no longer true or false but different from each other.
        A deeper understanding of truth at the personal level is needed to unravel the deadly dilemma of the ideal unity and historical plurality of truth. Truth as an impersonal abstract limit-idea is the final target proposed to concrete subjects. The two poles are : the aim or horizon and my personal situation of a truth-searcher. I have to discover the meaning of my existence, the truth of my being. But my perspective is narrow and finite. At the same time I aspire to link my limited and partial discoveries with reality as such in a language valid for all. This requires dialogue. Communication belongs to the structure of true knowing. I need to have recourse to the history of philosophy. This is the way for me to get out of myself. In my personal search for truth I have to get rid a monadic definition of truth, where truth is reduced to the adequation of my answers to my problematics. I must open myself to an intersubjective definition of truth. Then I understand truth as the being common of philosophers. Philosophia perennis springs forth from the community of honest searchers for the truth.
        But how can the community of the search for truth be truth itself? It looks nothing more that a divided and torn apart reign of truth. We are back to the deadly dilemma of the ideal philosophical unity of truth and the historical plurality of truths: dogmatism versus scepticism, the one versus the many.
        Ricoeur replies that the “one” of the history of philosophhy, which is the subjective side of the duty of philosophical thinking, is constituted by the endless dialogue of all philosophers. That “one” is the object of eschatological hope. We hope to be in the truth, we do not possess it. The function of hope is to maintain the dialogue always open and to introduce a fraternal intention in the most heated debates. History remains polemical and disconcerting but what unifies is the eschaton.. Thus scepticism is vanquished in the “one”, even though the “one” cannot be said. No one can write the perennial philosophy but every one must take it as the eschaton towards which all philosophical endeavours aim at.

* Ricoeur, Paul, Histoire et VÈritÈ, Seuil, Paris, 1967

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RINPOCH Sogyal *

(Tibetan spiritual master, b.1947)

One particular path to the truth is enough: knowing one, you know all

The most important thing, says Rinpoche, is not to get trapped in what I see everywhere in the West, a “shopping mentality”: shopping around from master to master, teaching to teaching, without any continuity or real, sustained dedication to any one discipline. Nearly all the great spiritual masters of all traditions agree that the essential thing is to master one way, one path to the truth, by following one tradition with all your heart and mind to the end of the spiritual journey, while, of course, remaining open and respectful toward the insights of all others. In Tibet we used to say: “knowing one, you accomplish all.” The modem faddish idea that we can always keep all our options open and so never need commit ourselves to anything is one of the greatest and most dangerous delusions of our culture, and one of ego’s most effective ways of sabotaging our spiritual search.
When you have explored the great mystical traditions, choose one master and follow him or her. It’s one thing to set out on the spiritual journey; it’s quite another to find the patience and endurance, the wisdom, courage, and humility to follow it to the end. You may have the karma to find a teacher, but you must then create the karma to follow your teacher. For very few of us know how truly to follow a master, which is an art in itself. So however great the teaching or master may be, what is essential is that you find in yourself the insight and skill to learn how to love and follow the master and the teaching.

* Rinpoche, Sogyal, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Ryder, London, 1992

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RITSCHL, Albrecht *

(German protestant theologian, 1822-1889)

The truth of religion is not theory but practice

Ritschl's theological system rests on an epistemology influenced by the philosophy of Kant. Ritschl denies human mind the power to arrive at a rational knowledge of God. Consequently religion cannot have an intellectual, but merely a practical-moral foundation. Religious knowledge is essentially distinct from scientific and philosophical knowledge. It is not acquired by a theoretical insight into truth, but, as the product of religious faith, it is bound up with the practical interests of the human life. Religion is practice, not theory. Knowledge and faith are not only distinct domains; they are independent of and separated from each other. While knowledge rests on judgements of existence, faith proceeds on independent "judgements of value", which affirm nothing concerning the essence or nature of Divine things, but refer simply to the usefulness and fruitfulness of religious ideas. Anticipating to some extent the principles of later Pragmatism, Ritschl declared that knowledge alone is valuable which in practice brings us forward. Not what the thing is "in itself", but what it is "for us", is decisive.

See Barth, Karl, Protestant thought, Chap.11 on Ritschl, p. 390sq, Clarion Book, Simon & Schuster, 1959

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ROBINSON J.A.T. *

(English theologian, 1919-1983)

Truth is two-eyed : the unitive pluralism of truth

        Robinson’s central idea is that there are cases – in particular the case of the concept of God as “Thou” (in Christian tradition) and “That” (in the Vedantic tradition) – when the unity of truth is impossible to achieve. It is futile and even harmless to want the unity of truth at all cost. Wisdom consists in holding the two ends of the chain – the thesis and the antithesis – without attempting to find an impossible synthesis. In such cases truth should not be symbolised by the tracing of a circle with one center but by one of an ellipse with two centers. Truth is not one-eyed but two-eyed. In many instances a dualistic or even a pluralistic view of truth is inescapable.
        According to Robinson – who authored the well-known book ‘Honest to God’ - the problem of the knowledge of God, seen in the Christian perspective, needs a significant overhauling when confronted with the Hindu view of the same. After a journey to the Indian subcontinent, he added another book to his credit, entitled ‘Truth is two-eyed’. The contact with the Hindu tradition compelled him, so he felt, to look at truth with a different glass of vision. Dealing principally with the crucial question whether God’s essence is personal or impersonal, he came to the following conclusions:
        a) There are two distinct traditional views of God: the Christian and the Hindu.
        - In Christianity one finds the primacy and ultimacy of the “Thou” over the “That”. The Christian view of God cannot be expressed by categories inferior to those required to describe what is the highest in personal relationship: love, trust, freedom, responsibility. The God of Christianity is a personal God.
        - In Hinduism one finds the opposite movement of the primacy and ultimacy of the “That” over the “Thou”. The sa-guna (qualified) Brahman, that is, Is’vara, the personal divinity, is an anthropomorphic representation. The ‘I-Thou’ understanding of Christian personalism is inferior to the ‘I-That’ or ‘Tat-Tvam-Asi’ view of the Upanishadic tradition. The impersonal Brahman is the ultimate truth whereas the anthropomorphic Is’vara is a concession to popular devotion, unable to raise itself above a human image of the divine.
        b) Which viewpoint should one adopt? Which of the two concepts of God is the “true” one? To solve the dilemma, Robinson makes three observations.
        - First: each intuition - the personal and the impersonal - taken in isolation is inadequate and responsible for serious distortions.
        - Second: it is equally wrong to think that a synthesis of both traditions in the Hegelian sense is possible. The ‘one-eyed’ approach is necessarily biased. One must adopt the ‘two-eyed’ attitude without attempting to make a synthesis. In fact not a few wise thinkers within their own traditions have shown openness and sensitivity to the pull of the other pole. Robinson invites us to live with both poles, within the tension occasioned by both. The best working model of reality in this case may be elliptical or bi-polar: not one centre but two centres of the same reality . The I-Thou and the Tat-tvam-asi do not say the same thing. They should be neither isolated nor fused. There should be neither absorption and nor syncretism but the ‘unitive pluralism’ of an unresolved dialogue. -Third: Robinson remarked that by temperament or tradition one may be inevitably drawn to one side rather than to the other. Do we not have always a stronger eye?

        Incidentally Robinson’s “two-eyed” approach to truth on the divine essence was also adopted to resolve the famous 16th c. Church controversy between Jesuits and Dominicans in the controversy “De Auxiliis”. The question was how to reconcile the divine omnipotence and omniscience with the free-will of created human beings. To affirm the former amounted to deny the latter and vice versa. The controversy ended after centuries of debates with the admission that no synthesis is possible and that both ends of the chain must nonetheless be upheld. It was finally recognized that truth, in this matter at least, is two-eyed.

* Robinson, J.A.T. Truth is two-eyed, London, SCM, 1979; Honest to God, London, SCM, 1962

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RORTY Richard *

(American philosopher, b.1931)

            Philosophy must abandon the pursuit of Truth

We have no access to reality that is independent of those beliefs and theories about the world, the truth and falsity of which we are interested in determining. We have no possibility of comparing our beliefs with reality to see whether they “correspond” to each other in order to reach the truth. Objective true knowledge is an illusion.

Rorty agrees with the pragmatist view that truth is “what is good for us to believe” (W.James). To say that what we believe may not be true, is simply to say that somebody else has come up with a better idea. The test of truth is not reality; we are the test of truth or untruth in that we are the source of better or worse ideas in which to believe. One idea is better than another insofar as it enables us more effectively to achieve our goals. But there are a multiplicity of goals, hence a multiplicity of conflicting discourses about the world. This proliferation of discourses is not only inevitable; it is preferable than the convergence of opinions upon one final belief.         Rorty’s pragmatism is more radical than its classical forms. According to him the Peircean pragmatist (see Peirce) notion of truth as the convergence of all views should be abandoned. The task of philosophy in an “ocean of alternatives” is not to minimize the differences between them. Philosophers should foster conversation between the participants, with no intention that the conversation may lead anywhere - and certainly not to the truth. The conversation has no particular destination because, in any case, the pursuit of truth is an absurd and impossible project. The philosophical activity has nothing more serious to achieve than the playful exchange of opinions. We should not expect more than that in a world that we inhabit temporarily and which defies our attempts to say anything final about it. None of our theories and beliefs are true , but simply ‘good in the way of belief’. The concept of “truth” should be dropped. The philosopher discusses for the sheer delight of exchanging opinion, nothing more. Rorty’ pragmatism agrees with the Nietzschean view that the will of truth must be abandoned.

•    Rorty, Richard, Truth and Progress, Cambridge University Press, 1998

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ROSMINI Antonio *

(Italian philosopher and theologian, 1797-1855)

To know and to know the truth is the same thing. Error is not found rooted in the intellect but in the will.

    Objectivity, in Rosmini’s view, is essentially a characteristic of what is known. Certainty is a characteristic of the person who knows, and can be defined as ‘a firm and reasonable persuasion that conforms to the truth’. We can be certain only of knowledge, not of error, and this because, according to Rosmini, to know and to know the truth is the same thing. The person who does not know the truth, does not know. There is no doubt, of course, that it is possible to be persuaded, and firmly persuaded, of error. But rational persuasion of error arrived at through one's own reasoning is not possible. In this case, either the premiss is wrong, or the argument is erroneous. Formal error will not be found rooted in the intellect nor in the senses nor in involuntary reflection. It begins with the will, the only human faculty capable of drawing the reason to invent what it does not see, or to deny what it sees. Under pressure from the will, reason will falsely affirm that being is not, or deny that being is.

    Rosmini argues that the truth of a thing is, in last analysis, its being, and since being is the form of the human intellect, it follows that a criterion of truth and certainty lies at the base of all thought and reasoning. The principles which govern reflection and argument are founded on the primitive intuition of being. "Being is the object of thought"; this is the principle of cognition, and it is antecedent to the principle of contradiction. Error is found, not in the idea of being, which is without any determination, nor in the principles of reasoning, which simply express the essential object of the mind in the form of a proposition without adding anything foreign, but in reflection, and hence in the will, which usually initiates reflection. Logic is the science which shows us how to use reflection so as to attain truth and avoid error.

    The light of being, the first and universal form of truth, is the objective, constitutive element of human intelligence.  Certainty is 'a firm and reasonable persuasion which conforms to the truth'. Formal error, which excludes certainty, is ultimately our willed attempt to create truth for ourselves and the only interior source capable of harming our intellectual and moral development; the most obvious manifestation of such error is hardened scepticism which leads us to deny reflectively the principles whose truths we know directly.

    In a word, Rosmini holds that basic knowledge, consisting of the idea of being and its immediate determinations, provides all that is needed for objective thought. Free to adhere to or reject what is known, human beings cannot be coerced by attempted external pressure or used as a means by others without prejudice to the inviolable truth in which they share innately through their participation in the light of being and which they attain adventitiously through the direct perception that unfolds determined truths to their intellectual gaze.

*See DAVIDSON, Rosmini's Philosophical System ,London, 1882

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ROSS David *

(British moral philosopher,1877-1971)

There are objective moral truths

    Ross defended ethical intuitionism. He argued that there are objective ethical truths, that the basic ones are self-evident, and that skeptical attacks on morality fail. He further argued that our ethical intuitions are best captured, not by utilitarianism, but by a set of "prima facie" duties that are Kantian in nature, i.e., universal and deontic. Ross calls such general principles prima facie duties in light of the fact that, "all things being equal" i.e., no other opposing circumstances present, we ought to follow the principle. For example, all things being equal, we ought to keep promises.

    He felt that it accords better with common sense to recognize various prima facie duties: we ought to do good to others, keep our promises, avoid harming others, and so forth. When these duties conflict, we have to weigh one duty against another and see which is stronger in the situation.

    Following common sense, we should recognize an objective moral order. The basic principles of ethics, like those of math and logic, are self-evident truths. These principles become clear to us when we reach sufficient intellectual maturity.

    Skeptics may doubt these first principles, the fact is that we all rely on them in daily life. We can't rid ourselves of such common sense intuitions - nor should we try. Our considered common sense intuitions are the data to which ethical theory must conform.

    The moral intuition or perception about which we are talking is not the same as perceiving a color, a sound, a taste, a texture, or a smell; nor is it the same as perceiving physical thing. The moral perception is a grasping of a truth. When it picks out morally relevant parts of a situation, it makes use of perceptions of the non-moral kind, but it goes beyond them to certain features as morally relevant, features that call for applying a prima facie duty to the situation. When moral intuition grasps the prima facie duties themselves, it is a grasping of a moral general truth.

* Sir David Ross, The Right and the Good (1930)

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ROSTAND Jean *

(French biologist, 1894-1977)

            Impossible to believe in a Truth behind us

    Rostand adopts what he calls the stand of “philosophical actualism”. It is impossible to believe in a “truth” that is behind us and to take into account a “revelation” supposed to have occured to our ancestors in some distant past. Perhaps these old traditions are quite respectable; they have played an important role in history, specially for the promotion of ethical values. But it is impossible for the man of today to take these traditions as the foundation of certain truths to live by. Rostand’s view agrees with Lessing’s contention (see Lessing) that there is a gulf between historical probabilities and the demonstrable truths of reason and that nothing can be demonstrated by means of so-called historical truths.

    Worthy beliefs are those that can be recreated at any moment by our intellectual capacity and the proper use of reason from materials provided by science and free reflection. This is the stand of “philosophical actualism” which uncompromisingly excludes a whole portion of the human past. The only truth to which one should adhere is the one that is discovered slowly, gradually, painfully by the man of today in the context of the present socio-cultural environment.

* Rostand, Jean, Ce que je Crois, Grasset, Paris, 1953

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ROUSSEAU Jean Jacques *

(French writer and philosopher, 1712-1778)

Conscience is the infallible guide to truth

“Cherchez la vérité vous-même”, search for truth by yourself. God has given human beings conscience and reason, the passive power of feeling and the active power of judging. In giving heed to the inner voice of conscience in the contemplation of Nature man follows the light which God has given him. This is the ‘natural religion’, through which God speaks directly to every human heart.

One should not care for the wisdom of philosophers. The truth that God exists is found in the depths of one’s heart, written by Nature in ineffaceable characters. Conscience is in all circumstances an infallible guide to truth and right action. This makes human beings free from the terrifying apparatus of philosophies and revealed religions. One would waste one’s time in studying this immense labyrinth of human opinions. Truth is better reached in trusting natural feelings. It is enough for man to listen to what God says to the heart. This is Rousseau’s “natural religion” which has the advantage of being revealed directly to each individual. The so-called revealed religions are futile because in them God is supposed to have spoken to certain individuals and this can only be known by human testimony, which is fallible.

* Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Confessions, PUF, Paris, 1996

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ROYCE Josiah *

(American philosopher, 1855-1916)

Error implies absolute truth

Josiah Royce, the leading American proponent of absolute idealism, introduced a novel defense of absolute Truth through his “argument from error”.

The failure of most philosophical systems to solve problems seems to lead to scepticism, for on every side one finds conflict, doubt and error. But Royce thinks that the problem of scepticism is solved in this, that the very fact that there can be error implies that there must be an absolute truth. What is error? It is the failure of thought to agree with its intended object. But one cannot step outside one’s thought to compare that thought with the reality that one intends to think about. Still it is a fact that we recognise that we can be in error: therefore that implies that there is a higher thought which includes both the thought and its intended object. The assumption on which all rational thinking proceeds – that objective truth and error are possible - implies the Absolute, the all embracing thought which includes all thoughts and objects. From the possibility of error, Royce concluded that truth exists in an Absolute Knower, a mind for which all thoughts do correspond correctly and adequately to their objects. And just as error implies absolute truth, so also evil implies absolute goodness. Both error and evil are overcome in the Absolute. Whatever happens to our poor selves - error and evil - we know that the Whole is perfect, being the absolute truth and the absolute goodness.

* Royce, Josiah, The Religious Aspect of Philosophjy, See Macquarrie, J. Twentieth-Century Religious Thought, Harper & Row, New york,1963, p35-38

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RUSSEL Bertrand *

(British philosopher, 1872-1970)

            Truth is wider than human knowledge

        True propositions are not necessarily verifiable

1. Truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs.

    True and false belong to beliefs, and derivatively to statements and propositions. Beliefs have a subjective side and an objective side. Subectively the belief points at the state of the person who makes the assertion. It depends on the mind of the asserter. It is the expression of his conviction. Objectively the belief is related to something that makes it true or false. It indicates a fact. The belief is true when it is appropriately related to the fact, that Russel calls the ‘verifier’. Thus the three elements in belief are: a) the believer who holds certain convictions (and expresses them or not), b) the content of the belief, its meaning, c) the reference of the belief to the facts, the event of the fact

    Beliefs depend on the mind of the asserter for their existence but they do not depend on the mind for their truth. The mind creates beliefs but it does not create their truth. Truth is a property of beliefs that depends on something outside the beliefs. It is an extrinsic property of beliefs. The facts alone are not to be said “true”, but only beliefs may be true, depending on their relation with the facts. Russel adopts a realistic correspondence theory of truth, which he vindicates on the basis of an analysis of simple, basic perceptual propositions. (See below)

2. Truth is wider than knowledge

    A belief may be true even if there is no possibility to know that it is true. There are many cases where the verifier is unavailable. The assertion-belief is meaningful, it can be true or false but it is impossible to know it because the facts are inaccessible to verification. Russel refuses to identify truth with verification. He holds firmly that the nature of truth is different than its criteria. It is commonsensical to recognize that it is imposssible to verify many assertions we make in life. What we can know by direct personal experience is extremely narrow.

    There are two different correspondence theory of truth. One says that the assertions must be related to experience   and the other says they must be related to the facts. According to the first theory of correspondence, if the basic propositions do not derive from experience, one cannot say that they are true or false. Truth in that case is confined to propositions asserting what a person now perceives or remembers. Russel calls it the ‘epistemological’ theory which he considers a very narrow theory because it limits knowledge to a degree that is excessive. In its stead Russel turns to the "logical" theory, according to which the basic propositions need not be related to experience, but only to "fact". It holds that many propositions that are not related to experience, that is, not known propositions, can nevertheless be true or false. In this theory propositions can be said to be true even if no one has any experience of it and no evidence for it. Pure empiricism which claims that all true propositions are verifiable must be abandoned. Truth is wider than knowledge.

3. The criteria of truth

    Whereas the meaning and definition of truth are easy to spell out, the problem of the criteria of truth is more complex.   How to know that some assertion is true ? One must distinguish here:

    a) Inferential, derivative knowledge in which a conclusion is validly deduced from premises. This does not raise any problem .The real question is how do we come to know that the premises are true. Russel is little concerned with argumentations of pure logic. They are tautologies, unrelated to experience. The meaning of “truth” applied to logical tautologies is quite different from the meaning of “truth” applied to empirical statements. Russel is interested in the latter, in “intuitive” knowledge rather than inferential knowledge.

    B. Intuitive knowledge. Here our knowledge is infected with some degree of doubts so that the problem of the criteria of truth is complex. Two cases are possible:

- a) Either we are directly acquainted with some facts so that the knowledge obtained is self-evident. This is the case with “basic propositions” derived from direct observation. However this acquaintance is valid for one person only: the direct experiencer and no one else. In some cases many minds are acquainted with the same universals. Then some sort of universally valid experience is reached.

- b) In case of any given judgement - linking facts – it is not certain that the judgement is true. Error may have slipped in the linking of the facts. In the passage from direct perception to judgement, we move from the evident to the not so evident. The facts known by acquaintance may be absolutely infallible, but a judgement believed to correspond to facts is not absolutely infallible. There are degrees of evidences. Some judgements are more probable than others. The coherence theory – which fails to define truth - is of some use as a criterion of truth as it offers a certain degree of evidence when a variety of opinions are shown be be mutually coherent.

    The lack of certainty in the field of intutive knowledge is not to be deplored. On the contrary the demand for certainty is an intellectual vice. To endure uncertainty is difficult but inescapable. Belief in “a divine mission” is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted humanity. One must learn to suspend one’s judgment and for this the best discipline is philosophy. It does not teach scepticism. While dogmatism is harmful, scepticism is useless. What good philosophy must do is to dissipate certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

4. Common-sense truth

    Russel claims that his realistic epistemology agrees with the common-sense notion of truth and that is surely the strong point of his standpoint against all those who subjectivize knowledge and see it as a human creation or projection. He does not deny that truth is related to knowledge but that does not prevent him to follow the common-sense view that many things that could be known as true or false remain unknown by lack of verifiers.                                     His correspondence theory of truth is rooted on the consideration of basic perceptual propositions. The trouble with most philosophers, he claims, is that they elaborate a theory of truth of complex propositions. The sin of all epistemologies is to neglect the analysis of ordinary basic propositions – where it is clear and evident that a correspondence theory is the answer.

    Some critics have remarked that in claiming that some truths are unknown and unknowable, Russel has placed truth outside human knowledge and made it “supra-human”. Rejecting the “humanism” of truth, he has championed an almost ‘Platonist’ realm of truth beyond the human world. But then one should keep in mind that Russel never said that “facts” or “reality” are true, but only beliefs and assertions are. He seems to imply that non- or supra-human beliefs could be true. There is a realm of beliefs beyond human beliefs that might be true. One can imagine such a world, not human, where all beliefs are true because related to the facts, some sort of ideal world with many more verifiers than those found in our human world in which many verifiers are hidden. Thus for Russel truth is never outside knowledge but often outside human knowledge. However in some of his latest writings Russel seems to have repudiated his former view of an impersonal, non-human truth and found it to be a delusion. “My intellect, he wrote, goes with the humanists, though my emotions violently rebel against it.” (My Mental development, in Allen Wood, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russel, Evanston and Cambridge, 1944)

* Russel, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1967, p.69-81 ; An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth, Penguin, Hamondsworth, 1963; Eames, E.,R. Bertrand Russel’s Theory of Knowledge, George Allen & Unwin, London,, 1969, p. 144-156

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RADHAKRISHNAN, Sarvepalli *

Truth is revealed in religious intuition