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Wojciech Słomski
Wyższa Szkoła Finansów i Zarządzania w Warszawie
The problem of truth
Key words: philosophy, logic, culture, society
międzynarodowe studia filozoficzne
nr 1/2011
[s. 27-33]
The problem of the essence of truth appeared in European philosophy not only in
the version of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but also in the version formulated by
Pilate. But do we mean the same question in the first and the second case? In other
words, do we believe that intellectual point of view peculiar to philosophy is equiva-
lent to the problem of truth from the point of view of religion? In spite of the fact that
the problem of truth was raised by philosophers from the very beginning of philoso-
phy itself, there are still no satisfactory answers to this question.
Skepticism about the problem of whether it is possible to discover the truth and
even the possibility of its existence has an equally long history. The existence of truth
was questioned by sophists, who declared that there is no general truth and truth is
different to everyone, and not what is truthful is more worth choosing, but what is
more useful in practice. However, Plato, using the metaphor, taken from medicine,
compared lie to poison, drawing the attention to the fact that like poison, lie, used in
an appropriate way has some healing features.
St. Augustine followed Plato in the issues concerning the truth. Emotional cogni-
tion was considered by him to be inexact, as it delivered knowledge not about things
themselves, but about changing phenomena, which accompany them. On the basis of
these phenomena we may obtain knowledge about the world, which enables the pre-
diction of some natural events, but the real predestination of a human and real know-
ledge lies not in cognition of external world, but on analyzing the internal world. St.
Augustine wrote: Do not enter the world, come back to yourself. Truth lives inside a
human. The cognition of the external world is never exact, knowledge about it could
be deceitful, and therefore we have to realize that we can be wrong about everything.
Such realization leads to a doubt, which is considered by Augustine to be the expe-
WYŻSZA SZKOŁA FINANSÓW I ZARZĄDZANIA W WARSZAWIE 27