Disputed Questions on Truth

A disputed question is the written record of a public academic exercise. For each article, Aquinas first states a series of objections drawing on authorities and earlier positions; then he develops his own position in a brief body (the corpus); then he replies to each objection in turn. The format is dialectical, not systematic: it proceeds by testing positions against objections rather than by building a deductive edifice. The Disputed Questions on Truth comprises 253 articles gathered into 29 questions, accumulated over roughly three scholastic years at a rate of about one article per teaching day . This origin explains the work's range and its occasional unevenness: it is the record of live philosophical combat, edited for publication, not a treatise composed from start to finish.

In the first article of Question 1, Aquinas defines truth as the adequation of thing and intellect: a thing is true insofar as it conforms to the divine intellect that knows it, and a judgment is true insofar as it conforms to the thing. He situates 'the true' among the transcendentals—modes of being that apply to everything that exists—alongside 'thing,' 'one,' 'something,' and 'good' . This definition rejects the view that truth is primarily a property of things in isolation, and it also rejects the view that truth is merely a convention of human language. Truth is a relational property: it involves a conforming of intellect and reality, and its primary locus is the divine intellect, with human intellects participating in truth derivatively. The question then proceeds through a series of articles that refine and qualify this definition.

The textual history is unusually well documented. The Leonine Commission published a critical edition in 1925 and again in 1964, and this remains the standard Latin text . More remarkable is the survival of the original dictation for questions 2 through 22. A. Dondaine of the Leonine Commission established in 1956 that these dictation notes—apparently taken down as Aquinas spoke—are authentic, and scholars generally accept his determination . This means that for a substantial portion of the work, we are not dependent on later copies but have access to something close to Aquinas's spoken words. The work was compiled and edited fairly quickly: it is cited in a catalogue of his works from 1293, and William de la Mare was arguing against its theses by 1278. Vincent of Beauvais quoted fragments before his death in 1264/65.

The three-volume English translation published by Henry Regnery between 1952 and 1954 is the only complete English version of the Disputed Questions on Truth, and it remains the standard for English-speaking readers . It was translated from the definitive Leonine text, which gives it scholarly authority, and it is serviceable and generally accurate. Its limitations are those of mid-twentieth-century Thomistic translation: it tends toward literal rendering of Latin technical terms, sometimes at the cost of readability, and it does not include the extensive notes and apparatus that contemporary scholars expect. A more recent partial translation exists in French (Question 1, 2002), and Edith Stein's German translation (1931–1932) is notable for its attempt to render Aquinas in phenomenological terms, though it drew criticism for that very approach . No complete modern English translation with updated apparatus has superseded the Regnery edition.

The Disputed Questions on Truth is an earlier work, roughly contemporaneous with the Commentary on the Sentences (1252–1256) and preceding the Summa Theologiae (begun around 1265). It is not a draft of the Summa but a distinct exercise in the disputed question genre, which is more exploratory and less pedagogical than the Summa's article format. Several topics treated here receive more extended and experimental treatment than they do in the Summa, including the nature of truth, the transcendentals, the knowledge of angels, and the freedom of the will. Serge-Thomas Bonino has suggested that the 29 questions have an internal structure, moving from God to angels to humans to their historical realizations . Readers who know the Summa will find here a more sprawling, argumentative, and occasionally more revealing Aquinas, working through problems at greater length.

The most common misunderstanding is that it is a treatise narrowly about epistemology, a medieval equivalent of a book on the theory of knowledge. In fact, the 29 questions range far beyond truth as a cognitive relation. The first twenty questions address truth and knowledge, including God's knowledge, the divine ideas, the Word, and human cognition; the final nine questions address the good and appetite, including free will, grace, conscience, and love . The work is a comprehensive survey of philosophical theology, organized loosely around the transcendentals of truth and goodness. Readers who expect a narrow epistemological treatise will be surprised by the breadth of the material, which includes extended treatments of human freedom, divine providence, and the moral life.