RT Article
T1 Accommodating Ambiguity Within Aquinas’ Philosophy Of Truth
JF New blackfriars
VO 103
IS 1106
SP 517
OP 535
A1 Nancekievill, Catherine
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1807227448
AB To what extent can Aquinas' philosophy of truth accommodate ambiguity? If an ambiguous object is that which exhibits multiple conflicting meanings, and truth, as ‘the conformity of thing and intellect', has its source and purpose in the divine, does the ambiguous lead us away from God? If so, how do we square this with the experience of the ambiguous, such as in art, that appears to draw us towards the divine? The paper explores this aporia by an analysis of the first two questions of De Veritate in conversation with Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics and Pickstock's Truth in Aquinas. Drawing on these three sources, truth is posited as a translation of being. However, it becomes clear that any translation is imperfect, given the difference between the medium of the existence of the thing and the medium of truth in the intellect. Hence, multiple, sometimes contradictory, propositions are needed in order to express the being of the thing. Moreover, it is shown how the ambiguous can prompt recursive returning to the singular, drawing us beyond merely identifying ‘what' a thing is, and beyond propositions, to share in the divine actualization of existence.
K1 Being
K1 Existence
K1 De Veritate
K1 singular
K1 esse
K1 Truth
K1 Ambiguity
K1 Aquinas
DO 10.1111/nbfr.12726