Harold Joachim

Who was Harold Joachim?

Harold Henry Joachim was a British idealist philosopher. A disciple of Francis Herbert Bradley, whose posthumous papers he edited, Joachim is now identified with the later days of the British Idealist movement. He is generally credited with the definitive formulation of the coherence theory of truth, in his book The Nature of Truth. He was also a scholar of Aristotle and Spinoza.

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.