Truth. From Thomas Aquinas to John McDowell via Richard Rorty

Abstract

In this paper a comparison is made between the notion of truth as offered by Thomas Aquinas and John McDowell’s reflections on knowledge and truth. We suggest that some correspondences can be drawn between the thomist idea of trascendental truth and McDowell’s proposal of the unboundedness of the conceptual, and between the realist thesis that truth of things measure our understanding and McDowell’s defense of objectivity, understood as the constraint exerted by external reality on our thinking, which makes possible a free and responsible exercise of conceptual capacities. In order to highlight those correspondences, we analyse two essays of McDowell, in which, by examining some aspects of Rorty’s position regarding knowledge and truth, the southafrican professor offers a defense of objectivity that, far from being an obstacle for the characteristic freedom of our rational capacity, is a condition for it.