Open Thread on Truth and Particularity

We seem to have picked up both our fair share of intelligent, articulate, reasoned commenters and our fair share of trolls here at PoMoCon. I’m interested in getting the takes of all of our readers on the following two passages, both from Frederiek Depoortere’s Christ in Postmodern Philosophy :

(a) The claim that truth can only be found in the particular should not be confused with the one that truth is merely particular, never transcends a particular narrative frame or does get beyond its being bound to a certain time and place. Attention for the particular character of truth claims does not imply that we are denying the fact that these truths do indeed lay claim to being of universal validity.

(b) . . . the particular character of truth claims does not mean that all such claims are equally valid and that we can therefore as well re-establish our own narrative as a master-narrative, rejecting every rational account of our own particular beliefs. In each case, the particular character of our truth claims does not mean that we can abandon the rational explanation of our own particular position . It is not because all truth claims arise from a particular context and that we have no God’s eye point of view, no non-involved perspective to judge these competing claims, that dialogue between different positions has become impossible or that people have to remain locked up in their own narrative, in their own ‘separate universe of discourse’. This does not take away, however, that it is highly unlikely that this dialogue will ever result in a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung of differences in a higher unity, in a generally human consensus beyond the many particular positions participating in the dialogue. Or, to put it differently, we can only speak a particular language. Even if we would attempt to construct a kind of religious Esperanto in order to transcend the differences between particular religions, we are actually only creating one more particular language.