Argument
Closer to Truth
Overview
Closer to Truth is a television series on public television originally created, produced, and hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The original series aired in 2000 for two seasons, followed by a second series aired in 2003 for a single season. The third series of the program, Closer to Truth: Cosmos. Life. Mind. Meaning., launched in 2008, with 33 seasons to date. Closer to Truth airs on over 200 PBS and public television stations and has had over 200,000 station broadcasts.
The show is centered on on-camera conversations with leading scientists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars, covering a diverse range of topics or questions, from the cause, size and nature of the universe (or multiverse), to the mystery of consciousness and the notion of free will, to the existence and essence of God, to the mystery of existence (i.e., why there is anything at all).
Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, executive producer, writer, and presenter of the series. Peter Getzels is the co-creator, producer, and director.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The first includes all the sciences which are concerned with inanimate nature and which can be treated mathematically, more or less--mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics and chemistry. If one like to use big words to express simple things, it may be said that certain results of these sciences are eternal truths, final truths of last instance, whence they are called the exact sciences. But all the results are…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
States what Closer to Truth is.
And the teaching may have to go through many grades or provinces: in each of which it is possible to acquire a certain virtuosoship without being necessarily an adept in another. It is through what is called the development of intellect, judgment, and reasoning that the faculty of truth-detecting or truth-selecting comes.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Closer to Truth is.
Through a variety of channels, especially Neo-Platonism and St. Augustine, these ideas found their way into Christian theology; and great scholastic thinkers taught that the end of man is to know True Being, that knowledge is contemplative, that True Being is pure Immaterial Mind, and to know it is Bliss and Salvation. While this knowledge cannot be achieved in this stage of life nor without supernatural aid, yet so…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
Close in meaning to Closer to Truth; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Closer to Truth
Related ideas
- Christof Koch
- Nicholas Wolterstorff
- Francis Fukuyama
- Ned Block
- Bas van Fraassen
- Michael Ruse
- John Hick
- Alister McGrath
- John Searle
- Peter van Inwagen
- Giulio Tononi
- Max Tegmark
- Julian Baggini
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr
- Materialism
- Marvin Minsky
- A. C. Grayling
- Murray Gell-Mann
- Francisco J. Ayala
- David Bentley Hart
- David Chalmers
- Richard Swinburne
- Ray Kurzweil
- Roger Penrose
Place in the tradition
Part of Mind–body dualism.