The first quotation on your handout is actually kind of the epigraph of the entire paper,

and it's a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas' disputed questions on truth, and Aquinas says that the true and the true and the good include each other.

Since the true is a good, and every good is true. This goes right at the

heart of Aquinas' transcendental philosophy, not in the Kantian sense, but in the medieval sense

of the transcendental's being truth, goodness, beauty. And I think that seeing the way that true is contained in good and good is contained in true,

and both of them are contained in being, is really the key to understanding this Aristotelian concept of practical truth.

Okay. So, Aristotelians distinguish between two different modes or aspects of human thinking, reasoning, and knowledge.

The end for each human intellectual operation is the possession of truth.

But Aristotelians claim that one can possess the truth in two fundamentally different

ways. Theoretical thought and reasoning is successful in so far as it secures knowledge in the sense

of coming to grasp true propositions about the way things are. Practical thought and reasoning,

on the other hand,

is successful, and so far as it secures the truth

that is possessed by living well,

or living the good life for a human being.

To live well is to do the truth,

to borrow a phrase from John's Gospel,

and living well demonstrates a practical knowledge of how to live

a good human life. And furthermore, as Aquinas insists, the end of practical knowledge is action.

One who lives the truth, then, is himself the rule and measure of living well for a human being, but this measure is not

grasped or conveyed primarily in what this person says or rights or in true propositions

such a person could generally state. To do or live the truth is to possess the truth in a

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