I realize he’s writing from the Thomist tradition, and so his peers let him get away with such things… but assuming platonic essences exists and are simply given to our minds, and then using that to base the argument for how an intellect apprehends “truth”?? That’s begging the question of the worst kind! It made me cringe while listening and occasionally shout back, “But you can’t just assume that!”

In the analytic tradition, I think you’ll find no better explanation for truth than Quine’s explanation of Tarski’s “Convention T” for the semantic theory of truth. Quine’s short book “The Pursuit of Truth” is a somewhat technical, but richly insightful explanation of how truth works, explained by one of the 20th century’s most important logicians. It’s small, but it’s a slow read, and probably fits well to the kind of formal logic that programmers could enjoy.