Truth as Transcendental: Ontological Foundations

I realize he’s writing from the Thomist tradition, and so his peers let him get away with such things… but assuming platonic essences exists and are simply given to our minds, and then using that to base the argument for how an intellect apprehends “truth”?? That’s begging the question of the worst kind! It made me cringe while listening and occasionally shout back, “But you can’t just assume that!”

In the analytic tradition, I think you’ll find no better explanation for truth than Quine’s explanation of Tarski’s “Convention T” for the semantic theory of truth. Quine’s short book “The Pursuit of Truth” is a somewhat technical, but richly insightful explanation of how truth works, explained by one of the 20th century’s most important logicians. It’s small, but it’s a slow read, and probably fits well to the kind of formal logic that programmers could enjoy.

Question I would ask is, while I agree (aesthetically) with what I think his position is - when he sets up logical vs. ontological truth as competing models of reality, is he not setting ontological truth as "real reality," and then logical truth as "reality prime," as in, he has set up a figure/ground relationship that favours ontological truth, but appears to be arguing as though he is weighing them as complementary?

Maybe he's still setting it up after the halfway point? I don't disagree with him about the necessary conditions for transcendental truth, but the form of his argument seems to leave that thread to be tugged on.

Feisty Feser at it again

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