The American academy is under attack. Authoritarian populists dismiss academic expertise, and they oppose the values that universities have traditionally upheld. Central among these is the idea of truth. The issues at stake are older than the current political struggle, however. Indeed, academics have planted some of their seeds. For we have lost sight of the central task of the sciences in society, and we have become inarticulate about the academy’s highest values.

This lecture will introduce a new way to think about truth, a conception I call holistic alethic pluralism. I’ll talk about science—in a broad sense that includes all academic disciplines—as one specific social domain of truth alongside other domains of truth. And I’ll show how this conception of scientific truth can help explain the social legitimacy of science, reestablish its societal autonomy, and transform our universities.

Lambert Zuidervaart is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at ICS and the University of Toronto, Resident Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, and an internationally recognized expert on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. His current work articulates a new conception of truth for an allegedly post-truth society. Recent books include Social Domains of Truth: Science, Politics, Art, and Religion (Routledge, 2023) and Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth (SUNY Press, 2024).