Course Description: What is the relationship between truth, science, and religion? Is truth-seeking research the task of science exclusively or can other areas of human inquiry, such as philosophy and religion, also pursue truth? Are there different senses of “truth”? Is philosophy a search for “truths”? What is the function of ordinary and logical/mathematical languages in finding such “truths”? What is the relationship between these “truths” and politics and democracy?

We will discuss these questions in light of three philosophical traditions from the twentieth-century: analytic, pragmatist, and continental (European). We’ll see that these traditions often ask similar questions but deploy different methods of inquiry. We’ll read philosophers such as A.J, Ayer, Charles Peirce, William James, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and John Dewey. Their ideas will help us to develop our own philosophical understanding of these questions.

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