The Classical Definition of Truth in Désiré Mercier’s Epistemological Thought
Abstract
The main aim of this article is to present an outline of the most important part of a theoretical-cognitive conception by Désiré Mercier, a founder of a Neo-scholastic Louvain school, showing not only the issue crucial to his philosophy, but also an evolution of an epistemological thought by a Belgian cardinal.
In this main part, the article examines an evolution of Mercier’s means of interpretation of a classical definition of truth, and shows a prospect for the analysis of his understanding of a judgement’s nature, especially the nature of the references between its two basics constituents: a subject and predicate. In Mercier’s opinion, it is the most important problem in all theory of certainty, and he defines it like a first fundamental problem – a synthesis of the subject and predicate, i.e. the question on the status and cognitive value of different kinds of opinion. His effort in solution of this problem concerns mainly A general criteriology, Mercier’s main work in which a systematic theory of cognition is derived from Thomas Aquinas’s classical texts, confirming a Thomistic epistemology on the paths of a philosophical realism.
References
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