Background
Joachim, Harold Henry was born in 1868 in London.
Joachim, Harold Henry was born in 1868 in London.
Manuscripts and Archives. Balliol College, Oxford.
Fellow of Merton College, Oxford: Lecturer, St Andrews: Fellow, Balliol, Merton and New Colleges: Wykeham Professor of Logic, University of Oxford, 1919-1935.
Joachim’s only work of creative philosophy was The Nature of Truth (1906). This contained a critique of truth as correspondence and a defence of a coherence theory, both of exemplary clarity. I1 also contained a critique of a view of ’truth as a quality of independent entities’ which Joachim ascribed to Russell and Moore. The subsequent discussion of this critique by Russell and Moore, and Joachim’s response, are of great interest as the only close and well-argued Point of contact between the idealist logic which Joachim had distilled from Bradley and the view of logic as an objectivized interrelationship of independent propositions. Although the idealist framework of Joachim’s critique had no real effect, his wit and the sharpness of his arguments must have done much to temper some of the extremes of the earliest analytical philosophy. He wrote in caricature of Russell: ’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 speak, its flavour, which we must recognize, if we recognize it at all, immediately: much as we appreciate the flavour of pineapple or the taste °f gorgonzola. fS. Eliot wrote that, of his teachers, ‘to Joachim alone am I aware of any debt for instruction in the writing of English.. to his criticism of my papers I °we an appreciation of the fact that good writing ls impossible without clear and distinct ideas’. Russell’s view was that The Nature of Truth was the best statement of an idealist theory °f truth. Joachim remains the British idealist whose work is most easily accessible to those who lived through the analytical period.