Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prolegomenon
- Aristotle on the Nature of Truth
- 1 The Saying of Things
- 2 A History of Truth as Cor-respondence
- 3 Saving the Things Said
- 4 By Way of Address
- 5 By Way of Response
- 6 The Truth of Nature and the Nature of Truth in Aristotle
- 7 On Saying the Beautiful in Light of the Good
- 8 Ecological Justice and the Ethics of Truth
- Works Cited
- Index of Passages Cited
- General Index
1 - The Saying of Things
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prolegomenon
- Aristotle on the Nature of Truth
- 1 The Saying of Things
- 2 A History of Truth as Cor-respondence
- 3 Saving the Things Said
- 4 By Way of Address
- 5 By Way of Response
- 6 The Truth of Nature and the Nature of Truth in Aristotle
- 7 On Saying the Beautiful in Light of the Good
- 8 Ecological Justice and the Ethics of Truth
- Works Cited
- Index of Passages Cited
- General Index
Summary
The whole vast scheme of things seems to be engaged in expressing what it is.
Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge, The Realm of MindHuman speech is rooted in our inchoate encounters with things. It grows in response to their primordial language, nourished by our attempts to come to terms with the world into which we are born. If, as Hannah Arendt claims, action corresponds to the human condition of natality insofar as it names the capacity to begin something new, speech must be heard to belong to a world of action in which new possibilities open as we are addressed by a language always operative in our encounters with things. Human speaking emerges in and through acts of response to the saying of things.
If human speaking is intimately bound up with action in the manner Arendt so powerfully suggests, it is because the speech acts that give rise to human speaking are themselves predicated on an ability to respond to things in ways that do justice to the paradoxical ways they show themselves, at once lending themselves to and eluding human articulation. However insightful, Arendt's analysis of the human conditions of action and speech does not go far enough. By grounding speech in “the fact of distinctness” and “the actualization of the human condition of plurality,” she registers only the human side of the dialogue, in effect muting the eloquence of things.
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- Information
- Aristotle on the Nature of Truth , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010