TAMER NAWAR

Research Project: Truth in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (TAMP), funded by the European Research Council (2023-2027)

Although past philosophers discussed the nature of truth in significant detail and with considerable philosophical sophistication, our understanding of past theories of truth is surprisingly limited and we lack a clear idea of how notions of truth developed in later Greco-Roman antiquity or in the Arabic and Latin medieval traditions.

This project will offer the first focused and systematic examination of philosophical conceptions of truth in ancient and medieval philosophy. It will examine the origins, motivations, and challenges faced by conceptions of truth in this period and how these challenges led to the development of alternative theories of truth. By holistically examining both ‘major’ and ‘minor’ figures and texts in this period and combining metaphysical approaches to truth (focusing on issues such as facts, correspondence, etc.) with logical and semantic approaches (focusing on issues such as semantic paradoxes) this project will offer us a better understanding of a central philosophical issue across the Greek, Arabic, and Latin traditions and greater insight into an extremely rich but often neglected period of philosophy.