Abstract
Truth has always been a controversial subject in Aristotelian scholarship. In most cases, including some well-known passages in the Categories, De Interpretatione and Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the predicate ‘true’ for assertions, although exceptions are many and impossible to ignore. One of the most complicated cases is the concept of practical truth in the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics: its entanglement with action and desire raises doubts about the possibility of its inclusion to the propositional model of truth. Nevertheless, in one of the most extensive studies on the subject, C. Olfert has tried to show that this is not only possible but also necessary. In this paper, we explain why trying to fit practical truth into the propositional model comes with insurmountable problems. In order to overcome these problems, we focus on multiple aspects of practical syllogism and correlate them with Aristotle’s account of desire, happiness and the good. Identifying the role of such concepts in the specific steps of practical reasoning, we reach the conclusion that practical truth is best explained as the culmination of a well-executed practical syllogism taken as a whole, which ultimately explains why this type of syllogism demands a different approach and a different kind of truth than the theoretical one.
Highlights
In the following study we will try to capitalize on various approaches to the notion of ‘practical truth’, in order to delineate a comprehensive idea of truth that connects both with practical and theoretical reason
For a philosopher with such sensitive ‘antennas’ for homonymy and ambiguity, Aristotle seems rather uninterested in clarifying a central or ‘focal’ meaning for truth. In his influential study on the subject, Paolο Crivelli (2004: 45) admits that Aristotle never explicitly addressed the problem of the multiple ‘bearers’ of truth and falsehood in his philosophy, to which we may add that there is not much talk about different ‘kinds’ of truth either – one could say that there are some distinct manifestations thereof
To give a sense of the controversy around this notion: the views of scholars range between the thesis that “there is no such thing as practical truth” (Kenny 2011: 2) to a most recent praise of Aristotle’s innovative notion of practical truth as the cornerstone upon which the distinctness of practical reason relies (Olfert 2017)
Summary
For a philosopher with such sensitive ‘antennas’ for homonymy and ambiguity, Aristotle seems rather uninterested in clarifying a central or ‘focal’ meaning for truth. Correct combinations of things and their predicates is a recurring theme in other texts as well.2 With these examples in mind, most of the apparent inconsistencies in the terms aletheia or aletheuein throughout the corpus could be resolved by clarifying the relationship between truth-bearing objects (to which Aristotle ascribes priority) on the one side and true or false propositions and beliefs in dianoia or logos on the other. Such efforts have already been made by scholars in the last two decades, with some significant results..
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