Problem prawdy w ujęciu Wilhelma z Owernii

Abstract

William of Auvergne (1180-1249) was one of the first professors of the University of Paris to engage with the Greek, Islamic and Jewish philosophical writings that had become available in Latin translation. He was the author of a vast work that he called the Magisterium divinale (Teaching on God). De universo (On the Universe), written in the 1230s, is the most philosophical treatise of the Magisterium. One short part (I, 3, 25-26) of this treatise includes a very important philosophical topic ‒ the problem of truth. Based on the doctrine of Avicenna, William formulated one of the forms of truth’s classical definitions. In his view, this definition expresses the essence of logical truth, which constitutes the relation occurring between the intellect and the thing, if the intellect is adequate to the thing. So logical truth is a basis and property of tiue judgments and statements about all real things, and even about what really does not exist (things in the future, in the past, non-beings, negations), and ‒ generally ‒ about all that man can think about or everything that is possible to be thought about. William rejects the doctrine of St. Augustine, who taught that every truth has its source in the First Truth identified with God the Creator of all things and intellects. William argues that existing things are real and their existence is caused by God only, so only actually existing things can be substrates of truth and so subjects of true judgments and statements. The Creator doesn’t cause things as existing in the past or in the future, but as existing actually. What is more, He does not cause non-beings and negations. In consequence, William recognized logical tiuth as the only justification for tiue adjudication of all that exists and doesn’t exist. In Steven P. Marrone’s opinion, William’s theory of tiuth was a new idea in the early thirteenth century. He believes that William’s theory, however incomplete, explains how much the problem of truth is dependent on logic rather than metaphysics, so that it could be separated radically from questions of being and viewed independently of the issue concerning the relation of the mind and creatures to God. In fact, although William continued to speak in traditional tenns, he disagreed with the point of view of ontology and natural theology, finding solutions in theories of logic and language. However, studies reviewed for this article seem to show that William’s theory of tiuth is embedded in a metaphysical context. Furthermore, medieval logic is the science of the action of the intellect, which is a faculty of the human being. This is not logic in the twentieth-century’s sense. Thus, it does not seem to William resigned from metaphysics to logic. His theory of logical truth is imperfect because of metaphysical errors. The main error is that William considered logical truth, which is realized in the relation of intellect to things and so is one of the tiuths that exist in contingent beings, as final and the sole basis of every tiue judgment and statement, without regard to its dependence on the First Truth. Indeed, logical tiuth is not able to exist truly independently.