Logic and The Open Society : revising the place of Tarski’s theory of truth within Popper’s political philosophy

This chapter retraces the way in which the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper came to accept a Correspondence Theory of Truth from the work of the Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski. It is argued that Popper’s use of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth reveals crucial insights into the fundamental characteristics of Popper’s social philosophy.  Quite deceptively, arguments based upon Tarski’s theory of truth appear implicitly throughout the text of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). It is then demonstrated how Popper integrated a correspondence theory of truth into a theory of the functions of communicative language that he received from Karl Bühler.

Wandering Rocks : truth and purity in the Australian Irish diaspora

This thesis comprises a novel, Wandering Rocks, and a discursive component concerning the Australian Irish diaspora. Diaspora theory, loss of culture, rememory and silence (especially around accounts of Irish women), sentimental and creative forces perpetuating identity, and the importance of written works as artefacts imbued with ;milieu effects' are explored.

‘A cataclysm of truth from the crisis of falsehood’: reading Habermas on Calvino

Interest in the possibility of a Habermasian approach to literary criticism has recently been sparked by several book-length contributions from scholars working in the field of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. This article seeks to clarify the conceptual stakes in the current debate, which concern whether literature makes truth claims or merely imaginatively discloses new perceptions with a truth potential, by returning to Habermas’s most extended encounter with a literary work since the 1970s. Against the background of the philosophical issues, I re-read to Calvino’s highly self-reflexive If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller to show that in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas has managed to get everything backwards. Literature here reads philosophy alright, but not in the sense of the ludic deconstruction of rational argumentation into rhetorical play that Habermas supposes. Using the notion of an ontological poetics of self-reflexive literature, and with some help from Lacanian psychoanalysis, I interpret Calvino’s novel as a sustained meditation on the connection between authentic literature and the desire to read. In this light, it not only looks like Habermas has missed his polemical target, but, also, and more significantly, it becomes clear that abandonment of the link between literature and truth is misguided.