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1 Kurt Pritzl, O.P. Introduction The nature of truth and the human capacity to have it, to retain it, and to achieve more of it are topics that have preoccupied philosophers at least since the moment when the goddess told Parmenides that she would teach him “all things, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliance.”1 There are ancient forms of relativism and skepticism in contention with large and substantial accounts of truth worthy of the divine grounding that Parmenides discerned it to have. With modernity, however, comes the opening for more thoroughgoing and sophisticated versions of relativism and skepticism, and these have appeared in the several directions that philosophical reflection has taken since the seventeenth century. Thus in more recent philosophy we find deflationary theories of truth in the analytic tradition and denials of truth in the post-modern deconstructionist side of the continental tradition, with various relativist accounts in both. Thoughtful defenses of objective truth as a substantial and ineliminable datum for philosophical reflection have not been lacking.2 What is 1. Parmenides, fragment 1, lines 28–30, quoted from the translation of G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven , and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 243. 2. For a small sample, see Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Robert Sokolowski, The Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008). For an excellent overview and helpful collection of essays on the issues bearing on the competing robust and deflationary theories of truth, see the introduction and selections in Truth, edited by Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2   Kurt Pritzl, O.P. curious about the debate, however, is that rather straightforward and logically powerful philosophical arguments for truth, in tandem with common -sense pragmatic considerations, have less traction than expected, among philosophers and even among people in general. Thomas Nagel points out the validity of the strategy of applying the test of self-reference to theories of relativism and the fact that in the practical order our very lives depend on our beliefs being true.3 Nevertheless, the idea continues that objective truth cannot be obtained and shared and that truth has no hold over the lives of human persons whose rationality is instead subordinate to will or desire. Simon Blackburn diagnoses the failure of these considerations to carry more universal weight as a sign that even as individuals we harbor uncertainty, indeed, anxiety, about our engagement with truth, for which the remedy is better and more careful reflection.4 This collection of essays offers studies of truth as a substantial and dominant reality in the lived experience of human persons as rational agents. The essays contained in this volume consider philosophers from every historical period and what philosophers have said about truth in a variety of dimensions—ontological and psychological as well as epistemological and logical—and in different domains of life, such as art or law. The essays, for all their differences, all presume a worldly or engaged point of view, where truth is seen as part of the fabric of human experience for humans who live in the world and are drawn to understand it even in its wholeness. The aim of this collection is to contribute to discussion about truth in a way that enriches and amplifies strictly formal and logical considerations about truth so that its substantial or robust character can be better assessed and appreciated. “Aristotle’s Door” by Kurt Pritzl opens the volume by presenting Aristotle ’s complex, robust, indeed, exuberant account of truth as a working contrast to thin or dismissive accounts of truth, whose origins are briefly considered at the beginning of the essay. While appreciating the widespread ignorance, error, and slowness in learning that is to be found in human persons, Aristotle insists that human perceptual and intellectual life is full of truth and that human cognitive powers mostly suc3 . See respectively, Nagel, The Last Word, 15, and Thomas Nagel, “Honesty and History” (review of Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy), The New Republic (October 21, 2002): 27. 4. Blackburn, Truth: A Guide, xiv. [3.145.47.253] Project MUSE...

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