December 2008 Archives

PHILADELPHIA, PA - Today I presented a paper entitled The Metaphysics of Truth at the annual meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America at the American Philosophical Association's 2008 Eastern Division meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

The paper was part of a panel with Vincent Colapietro, my colleague at the Pennsylvania State University, and Brian Henning from Gonzaga University.  My paper focused on the many ways truth is said in Aristotle, arguing that the two fundamental ways in which Aristotle speaks of truth--as noetic touching and as declarative saying--must be thought together as part of an organic and unified understanding of truth. 

The panel as a whole was very well received and the discussion was lively and insightful.  I am grateful to the MSA for inviting me to be part of this panel.

This essay is an immanent critique of the story Reiner Schürmann tells concerning the origins of metaphysics as an epoch of hegemonic principles. In both Heidegger on Being and Acting and Broken Hegemonies, Schürmann identifies Aristotle as the father of a metaphysics that understands being in terms of human fabrication. The Duplicity of Beginning attempts to problematize this reading by suggesting that it too is a fabrication that succumbs to Schürmann's own critique of hegemonic metaphysics. This opens the possibility of reading the poetics of Aristotle's thinking as bound to the "ravaged site" between natality and mortality. "The Duplicity of Beginning: Schürmann, Aristotle and the Origins of Metaphysics." The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 29, 2 (2008). The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal has generously allowed me to make the full text of this article available in .pdf format: Click this link to download the full text of the article.

NEW YORK CITY - Today I returned to the New School to present what will be the first chapter of my forthcoming book, The Saying of Things: The Truth of Nature and the Nature of Truth in Aristotle.  It was wonderful to return home to the New School to present my latest work and to engage in the tradition of rigorous and lively dialogue that makes the New School such a rich site of intellectual development. The questions were welcomed and pressed me to think through more rigorously my understanding of "doing justice to things" and "ontological response-ability."

I was happy to know that although the building has changed, the spirit of the New School for Social Research endures.