St. Thomas claims truth is essentially a relation to intellect, and so one account of truth must develop along the lines of what essentially relates to our own intellect. Developed in this way, truth is how Kant describes it in his Copernican turn, namely that the only objects that we can know are those that owe their existence to our thought. So is this the only way to develop St. Thomas’s account of truth?
From one point of view, yes. We know object, but to be an object is to owe ones existence to a mind. It’s not as if there would be cognitive objects without minds to know them. Again, as the scholastics insisted, things are in knowers according to the way the knower exists.
One can distinguish his way out of this problem, but that is not the point here. Our present tendency to identify knowledge with the dialectics of “science” gets its clearest defense in this Scholasticism filtered through Kant, and if we wanted to get to the root of it, we should look here.
rmcquaid said,
May 17, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Here’s the problem with Kant:
Every object of knowledge owes its existence to our thought.
Every first principle is an object of knowledge
Therefore every first principle owes its existence to our thought.
The conclusion must be false. The truth of the principle “A thing can not both be and not be at the same time and in the same way” does not depend on anyone thinking it.
Since the conclusion is false, at least one of the premises must be false. The first premise is unassailable. The second must be false.