The Gift of Truth

Reexamines the good, tracing the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, and interpreting the good as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts.

This volume traces the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, exploring those developments in Western thought, from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, when ethics was separated from science and philosophy. At the heart of the project is a reexamination of the good, found in Plato as that which makes being possible, which gives authority to knowledge and beckons to art, preserved in Levinas as infinite responsibility. The idea of the good is interpreted as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts. It gives rise to an ethics of inclusion.