On October 9th, 2009, I received official word that my manuscript, The Saying of Things: The Nature of Truth and the Truth of Nature in Aristotle, was accepted for publication at the Cambridge University Press under the title: On the Nature of Truth as Justice in Aristotle. I am excited and honored to be part of a tradition of publishing that extends back 475 years to when King Henry the VIII first granted the University of Cambridge Press a “Letters Patent” that allowed them to print “all manner of books.”
The manner of my particular book involves taking up the thinking of Aristotle in a way that challenges the traditional understanding of the meaning of truth as the correspondence of idea and object. The Saying of Things is rooted in a reading of Aristotle as a naturalistic phenomenologist who is able to help us understand truth as co-response-ability, that is, as involving an ability to respond to the expression of things in ways that do justice to what it is they are. Thus, the book attempts to think truth in terms of justice even as it recognizes that justice is rooted in the attempt to give voice to the truth of things.
Specifically, the book draws on the traditions of American naturalism, particularly that of Woodbridge, Randall and Dewey, and Continental phenomenology, particularly that of Heidegger, in order to offer a dynamic and novel reading of Aristotle that has important implications for our ongoing understanding of the relationship between human-being and the natural world.