Absolute Truth?

Pardon me if I begin to wax a little philosophical--nay, a bit logical--for a moment. I converse often with people online about such subjects, though less than I did when I actually had the time to do so. But the occasion when I hear someone tell me that truth isn't absolute is fairly rare.

It happened recently--so I guess I figured a blog posting might be in order. This has been something of a hotbutton topic in the philosophical world for awhile, and I remember in English in 12th grade discussing something very like it, mostly in one of the tangential discussions for which Mrs Klinger is so famous.


In any case, I don't see how the proponents of relative truth ever got past this:

There is no absolute truth.
The preceding sentence is absolutely true.

That's just hard to handle logically. The assertion that truth is relative requires truth to be absolute in at least one instance. While the contradiction is self-evident here, what happens when we allow the single absolute truth, i.e., that all truth is relative? The problem then becomes one of epistemology--how we know what we know.

In the final analysis, those of us who believe in absolute truth have the same problem. How do we know what the truth is, and how do we objectively verify it? These are interesting questions, and maybe someday I will be willing to attack it. Tonight is not the night, though. So until later, I must remain devotedly yours,

E