Harold Joachim

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This page is not about the American art critic of the same name

Harold Henry Joachim (1868-1938) was a British idealist philosopher. He was a disciple of Francis Herbert Bradley, and is now identified with the movement British Idealism, in its later days. Joachim is generally credited with the definitive formulation of the coherence theory of truth, in The Nature of Truth (1906).

The coherence theory is nowadays viewed as part of a class of theories called robust or inflationary accounts of truth. In this class, it is a rival to the correspondence and the pragmatist theories. Both Bertrand Russell, arguing for the former, and William James, arguing for the latter, cited Joachim's text as a paradigm of what they thought was wrong about the coherence theory.

He was educated at Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford. He became Wykeham Professor of Logic of the University of Oxford from 1919 until his death.

[edit] Quotation

"'Truth' and 'Falsity', in the only strict sense of the terms, are characteristics of 'Propositions'. Every Proposition, in itself and in entire independence of mind, is true or false; and only Propositions can be true or false. The truth or falsity of a Proposition is, so to say, its flavour, which we must recognize, it we recognize it at all, immediately: much as we appreciate the flavour of a pineapple or the taste of gorgonzola."

[edit] Works

Study of the Ethics of Spinoza (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata) (1901)
The Nature of Truth (1906)
De lineis insecabilis (1908) translator
Immediate Experience and Mediation (1919)
Aristotle on Coming-To-Be and Passing-Away (De Generatione Et Corruptione) (1922)
Logical Studies (1948)
Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1957) edited from notes by John Austin and Errol Harris

He was probably involved, if uncredited, in the editing of Bradley's collected works, including the Collected Essays with Bradley's sister Marian de Glehn, and Ethical Studies.