By way of examining the shift in the development of philosophy as a system-building enterprise to a rhetorical practice, this essay investigates Martin Heidegger’s contribution to communication and rhetorical theory as pertains to the relationship between rhetoric and truth. Traditional correspondence theories of truth, wherein truth is the mere agreement of an assertion to its object, eclipse a more primordial truth, namely that of aletheia or uncovering. As a result, language and our rhetorical practices become but a mere tool for the establishment of correspondence. The essay suggests that Heidegger’s articulation of truth as uncovering offers an accomplished way of understanding possibility, pathos, and shared world-disclosure as they are implicated in both truth and our ethical and rhetorical practices.
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