Re: POTUS Elect Trump I: Get in pu$$y - we're gonna make American great again
Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.
(Kepler, courtesy of his time at the hand of the Jesuits, will explain meaning and author.)
Well, courtesy of my readings in philosophy unguided by any Jesuits except Frederick Copleston.
The translation is, roughly, "Truth is the correspondence between the idea and the thing-in-itself."
Saint Thomas packs a lot into those 6 words -- in fact the entire "correspondence theory" of ontology is carried in the expression. One thing that is important to remember is that in Thomism all existence is defined as apprehension of the existant in the mind of God. But we shouldn't anthropomorphize God, and God's mind (well, God is undifferentiated, so God Himself) does not "hold ideas" in the same sense that human minds "hold ideas." God is breathing forth all reality via His thoughts and since God is both perfect and all-encompassing, all things which
are are also by definition "true." God's thoughts aren't true, except in the tautological sense that they are reality itself and reality is true. Better to say God's thoughts are "truth." The truth in a human thought is the proportion in which it corresponds to the thing-in-itself, i.e., thing in the mind of God.
Sound familiar? Well it should. That's unvarnished Platonic ideation via Plotinus and one reason medieval philosophy is both so byzantine and so much fun. Another guy (named, oh I don't know, "Aristotle") might have defined truth as how well you can
predict what a thing will do based on what you think it is made of, what its essential form is, what caused it and what it's for. And the people who came after him in this Greek empiricist tradition might be called
scientists. Whereas Plato --> Plotinus --> Aquinas continued a Near Eastern tradition of viewing reality as a double image of God's mind, and hence of viewing the thoughts in your head as a double image of the sensory inputs which give you the "sense" of an object. And they continue on through Kant --> Hegel and continue to give reality all sorts of interesting additional baggage, leaving room for teleology in general and Neo-Thomist Catholic ontology in particular.
But my knowledge peters out (get it?) in the late 19th century, so I can't speak to what happens afterwards, except to say the 20th century was not a good one for philosophy and A New Approach Is Needed.