Closer To Truth
Inducted in 2026
Why it is in the collection
Asking well is harder than answering, and is almost never acknowledged as a skill. Kuhn has built twenty-five years of work on that skill: he frames the question exactly, listens, presses where the argument thins, and does not interrupt to perform.
He is in the collection above all for an active neutrality. To carry the same question about consciousness to a physicist, a theologian and a sceptical philosopher, and to publish all three answers with equal care, is an uncommon form of intellectual honesty: it obliges the viewer to think rather than to enlist. No one leaves feeling persuaded; one leaves understanding the options better.
And it is here as an archive. Thousands of recorded conversations with working researchers form a documentary holding that will outlast the platform's fashions. That the project sustains itself as a nonprofit and keeps the material accessible makes plain who it was made for.
About this channel
Closer To Truth is an interview series devoted to four large territories: cosmos, life, mind and meaning. Robert Lawrence Kuhn is its creator, executive producer, writer and presenter, with Peter Getzels as co-creator and producer-director. The series has broadcast weekly on PBS and public television stations in the United States since 2000, and its library holds more than five thousand in-depth interviews.
The format is deliberately austere: a sustained conversation with a philosopher or a scientist about a single question, put precisely and pursued as far as the interlocutor can take it. The titles show the reach of the project: whether consciousness depends on quantum physics or requires new physics, whether an artificial intelligence could ever be conscious, where human morality comes from, what all life must have in common, what time amounts to within particular theoretical frameworks, when a right to life begins, whether science and theology can sound together, whether critical thinking can be taught. Alongside the interviews sit open question sessions and series filmed at scientific gatherings.
What distinguishes the work is the interviewer's stance. Kuhn puts the same question to people whose answers are mutually incompatible ( materialists and theists, physicists and philosophers of mind ) and lets each develop the argument without steering toward a predetermined conclusion. A newcomer will find no thesis of the programme's own, but a map of the available answers and of their weak points. Closer To Truth is a nonprofit endeavour funded by the Kuhn Foundation and other partners, with revenue reinvested in production to keep the material freely available. The content is in English.