Umberto Galimberti. The misadventures of truth

What do we mean when we say that something is true?

With this question Umberto Galimberti opens the season of CortinAteatro in Cortina d’Ampezzo, guiding the audience through a lesson that traces the history of the word truth in Western culture, from the Greek philosophers to the present, to wonder what remains of it in the age of technology.

The journey begins with the Greeks, who thought of truth as alétheia, unveiling, and linked it to a form of visibility that Plato called idea, accessible to the gaze of the mind more than to that of the senses.

From that choice, observes Galimberti, also descends the long separation between soul and body that has marked Western thought.

Alongside the Greek tradition is the Jewish tradition, in which truth, ’emet, coincides with the reliability of a word given, and further on modern science, which recognizes as true what can be verified.

In the age of technology, the meaning changes once again, and true becomes what works and produces results.

Galimberti dwells on the consequences of this shift, in a world where the effects of our actions increasingly escape our ability to foresee them and where technology, from a tool in the hands of man, has become the very environment in which man lives.

This gives rise to a reflection that closely concerns our time, from the circulation of information to the relationship with artificial intelligence.

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