Double Truth

Double Truth

 

a term designating the doctrine of the division between philosophical and theological truths, according to which something that is true in philosophy may be false in theology, and vice versa. The double truth doctrine came into being in the Middle Ages during the era when Aristotelian philosophy was spreading, when it came to light that a number of the Aristotelian system’s philosophical tenets contradicted the dogmas of Islam and Christianity. The most influential thinker to be guided by the double truth doctrine in his polemics with Muslim theologians was Aver-roës. Deriving from this doctrine were the French 13th-century Averroism (its head at the University of Paris was Siger de Brabant) and some forms of English nominalism, such as that of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The double truth doctrine was widely held during the Renaissance, by Pomponazzi, the Padua school of Averroists, and others; it furthered the development of rationalism

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During the Age of Enlightenment, there was a debate over 'the double truth thesis' which posits a contradiction regarding accepting both reason and the superstitions of the masses.
Culture and the Death of God
For one thing, we should consider that the framers belonged to a generation (though Patrick Henry had his own views) that believed in the "Double Truth": The masses of people may need "superstitious" religion, but the educated elite believed, at most, in a non-supernatural, rationalistic God roughly equivalent to Nature, as Jefferson stated, or the abstract creative force behind it, certainly not in such things as conception by a virgin, the Resurrection, or Jesus' unique status as God as well as mortal.
Letters in the editor's mailbag
Some of the Latin Averroists, however, in effect developed what might be seen as a Thomistic distinction between our natural and supernatural ends so as approaching a variant on double truth theory: the truths of philosophy are transcended by the truths of Christian revelation (rather as Newton's physics is transcended by Einstein's).
Marenbon, John. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz
For our purposes here those inconsistencies will be dichotomised with a Straussian methodology of 'double truth' (Smith, 2009: 3)--distinguishing between esoteric and exoteric neoliberalisms.
Contesting 'actually existing' neoliberalism
The Double Truth, Chard deNiord's fourth collection, consists of lyric poems that examine the "double truth" of love itself, providing a modem perspective.
Chard deNiord. The Double Truth
Descartes was a slippery dissimulator--hard to catch in the act of dissimulating--because unlike Regius, he was careful to avoid the affirmation of a double truth, wherein what is true in natural philosophy contradicts what is true in faith (184, 16-18).
Descartes: Dissimulation et Ironie
"The Double Truth, Ruth: Do the Right Thing and the Culture of Ambiguity." African American Review 32 (1998): 215-27.
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Neither the Manichean tradition nor the Averroistic double truth was what was intended or employed.
"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted": the Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought
There is no mention of Averroeism or the so-called "doctrine of double truth," although a page is devoted to the Condemnation of 1277 and modern interpretations of it (18-19).
Scholastic Tradition and Humanist Innovation: The Concept of the Neutrum in Renaissance Medicine & Bruno, l'infini et les mondes
In an even cruder sense than that it is the kind of "double truth" that characterizes the public rhetoric of any politician who says one thing to the public but is aware of a deeper truth in private.
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n 3pts win double Truth Seeker (2.20 Yarmouth), Tarashaan (4.00 Ayr)
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The Averroistic "Double Truth" provides the linguistic and philosophical tools for doing so.
Ernest Renan's Averroism in the religious thought of Matthew Arnold

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