What is truth? This fascinating spectrum of studies into the various rationalities of our human dealings with life - psychological, aesthetic, economic, spiritual - reveals their joints and calls for a new approach to truth. Putting both classical and contemporary conceptions aside, we find the primogenital ground of truth in the networks of correspondences, adequations, relevancies, and rationales at work in life's becoming. Does this plurivocal differentiation mean that the status of truth is relative? On the contrary, submits Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, given the universal significance of the crucial instrument of the logos of life, "truth is the vortex of life's ontopoietic unfolding".

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

The fulgurating power of creative imagination - Imaginatio Creatrix - setting in motion the Human Condition within the-unity-of-everything there-is-alive is the key to the rebirth of philosophy. From as early as 1971 (see the third volume of the Analecta Husserliana series, The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed.), Imaginatio Creatrix has been the leitmotif for the research work of the World Phenomenology Institute (now published in eighty-three Analecta Husserliana volumes), one that is eliciting echoes from all around. Husserl's diagnosis of a crisis in Western science and culture, the inspiration of much of postmodern phenomenology, has yielded place to a wave of scientific discovery, technological invention, and change in societal life, individual lifestyles, the arts, etc. These throw a glaring light on human creative genius and the crucial role of the imagination that gives it expression. This present collection is an instance of that expression and the response it evokes. It manifests the role of imagination in forming and interpreting our world -in-transformation in a new way and opens our eyes to marvel at the new world on the way. Papers by: Semiha Akinci, John Baldacchino, Angela Ales Bello, Elif Cirakman, Tracy Colony, Carmen Cozma, Charles de Brantes, Mamuka G. Dolidze, Edward Domagala, Shannon Driscoll, Nader E1-Bizri, Ignacy Fiut, William Franke, Elga Freiberga, Beata Furgalska, Nicoletta Ghigi, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, David Grünberg, Oliver W. Holmes, Milan Jaros, Rolf Kühn, Maija Kule, Rimma Kurenkova, Matthew Landrus, Nancy Mardas, David Martinez, William D. Melaney, Mieczyslaw, Pawel Migon, Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia, Leszek Pyra, W. Kim Rogers, Bruce Ross, Osvaldo Rossi, Julio E. Rubio, Diane G. Scillia, Mina Sehdev, Dennis E. Skocz, Mariola Sulkowska, Robert D. Sweeney, Jan Szmyd, Piero Trupia, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Richard T. Webster.

The human being is today at the center of scientific, social, ethical and philosophical debates. The Human Condition-in-the-unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, under whose aegis the present selection of essays falls, offers the urgently needed new approach to reinvestigating humanness. While recent advances in the neurosciences, genetics and bio-engineering challenge the traditional abstract conception of "human nature", indicating its transformability, thus putting in question the main tenets of traditional philosophical anthropology, in the new perspective of the Human Creative Condition the human individual is seen in its emergence and unfolding within the dynamic networks of the logos of life, and within the evolution of living types. Just the same, the creative logos of the mind lifts the human person into a sphere of freedom. Within the networks of the logos we retrieve the classical principles – human subject, ego, self, body, soul, person – reinterpret them to counter the naturalistic critique (Tymieniecka). Thus principles of a new philosophical anthropology satisfying the requirements of the present time are laid down.

Having established in the ontopoiesis/phenomenology of life the creative function of the human being as the fulcrum of our beingness-in-becoming, let us now turn to investigate the creative logos. In this collection, the momentum of a gathering "creative brainstorm" leads to the vertiginous imaginative transformability of the creative logos as it ciphers through the aesthetic sense, the elements of experience – sensing, feeling, emotions, forming – in works of art, thus lifting human experience into spirit and culture. Papers by: Ellen J. Burns, Mao Chen, J.C. Couceiro-Bueno, David Brubaker, Madalina Diaconu, Michel Dion, Antonio Dominguez Rey, Elga Freiberga, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Calley Hornbuckle, Lawrence Kimmel, Ljudmila Molodkina, Chiedozie Okoro, Rebecca M. Painter, Aleksandra Pawliszyn, Osvaldo Rossi, Jadwiga Smith, Piero Trupia, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, James Werner, Raymond J. Wilson III.

"Does the World exist?" There would be no reason to resurrect this question of modernity from its historical oblivion were it not for the fact that recent evolution in science and technology, impregnating culture, makes us wonder about the nature of reality, of the world we are living in, and of our status as living beings within it. Thus great metaphysical subjacent queries are forcefully revived, calling for new investigations to proceed in the light of the innumerable novel insights of science. This collection presents a wealth of material toward an elaboration of a new metaphysical groundwork of the ontopoiesis/ phenomenology of life sought to effect such investigations. The classic postulates of the metaphysics of reality, those of necessity and certainty here find a new formulation. Away from sclerotized ontological and cognitive assumptions and congenial with the views of contemporary science, the understanding of reality, of our world of life, and of ourselves within it is to be sought in the existential/ontopoietic ciphering of life (Tymieniecka).

Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida's engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of 'being' and 'presence' that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the possibilities for the future of phenomenology, along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through detailed studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricur and Nancy, he shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserlian or Heideggerean thought alone can take account of Derrida's critique of ontology and yet still hold a commitment to the ontological. This new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future 'deconstructive phenomenology'.