Aquinas: Truth-Telling as a Moral Virtue

I recently came across a paper on Thomas Aquinas and truth-telling and wondered whether a medieval theologian/philosopher could say anything to an increasingly post-truth world. The author of the paper, Fainshe Ryan, quotes some lines from Michiko Kakutani’s book, The Death of Truth: “…cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e.… Read the rest