Relate to Heidegger On the Essence of Truth Relate to Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible.

Presents Nietzsche's evolving thinking on truth, which has exerted a powerful influence over modern and contemporary thought.

Since 2016, the rise of post-truth politics has created a situation of democratic discontent in the west. While many scholars tend to regard post-truth politics as a threat to democratic order, I would like to propose that what we have been witnessing in this form of politics has been the transformation of the democratic ethos. By turning to Michel Foucault’s lecture on the true life of Diogenes of Sinope, delivered at College De France in 1984, I ascertain the (...) framework for demonstrating how we can approach a new shape of democratic ethos in our era of post-truth politics. I argue that in Diogenes’s true life, Foucault saw the concrete life, which could liberate each individual from the constraints of their conventional lives by emphasizing the material conditions of all human bodies. Diogenes’s life could then be a form of self-emancipation since it not only showed how untrue the conventional life was but also released each individual from any conventions estranged from them. Relying on this point, I propose the notion of untruth as the new ground of our democratic lives. Though post-truth politics destroys the objective form of truth, the untruth—as its main element—can play a leading role in grounding our democratic ethos to the extent that it asserts our capability of self-emancipation. (shrink)

The skepticism I propose to discuss concerns the reality of an external world of perceivable material objects. There are three questions our skeptic may ask. The first is nonmodal and nonepistemic: Are some of the objects we perceive real? The second is also nonmodal but epistemic: Do we know, or at least have evidence, that some of the objects we perceive are real? The third is both modal and epistemic: Can we know, or at least have evidence, that some of (...) the objects we perceive are real? By definition, the epistemic questions are the ones the skeptic asks. But I shall take the first, the nonepistemic question as primary; it is, surely, also the one in which we, including the skeptic, are really interested. The traditional approach to skepticism has been to take it as asking one or both of the epistemic questions. I suggest that.. (shrink)

This lengthy volume contains philosophical treatises by Henry Deku written over a period of some thirty years, previously published in various journals, collections of essays and Festschriften, and now collected together to mark their author’s 75th birthday.

This volume discusses the development of the dialogue between Tagore (1861-1941) and Gandhi (1869-1948) during 1915 and 1941, about many things of personal, national, and international significance---satyagraha, non-cooperation, the boycott and burning of foreign cloth, the efficacy of fasting as a means of resistance and Gandhi's mantra connecting "swaraj" and "charkha". The author, Bindu Puri, argues that the debate was about more fundamental issues, such as the nature of truth and swaraj/freedom and the possibilities of untruth that Tagore (...) saw in Gandhi's movements for truth and freedom. Puri shows that the differences between the two men's perspectives came from differently negotiated relationships to (and understandings of) tradition and modernity. Tagore was part of the Bengal renaissance and powerfully influenced by the idea that the Enlightenment consisted in the freedom of the individual to reason for herself. Gandhi, on the other hand, remained close to the Indian philosophical tradition which linked individual freedom to moral progress. Puri points out that Tagore cannot, however, be unreflectively assimilated to the Enlightenment project of Western modernity, for he came fairly close to Gandhi in rejecting the anthropocentricism of modernity and shared Gandhi's belief in an enchanted cosmos. The only single-authored volume on the Tagore-Gandhi debate, this book is a welcome addition to the existing literature. (shrink)

This introductory paper aims to demystify the concept of untruthfulness. Drawing on the scholarship on deception, the author reports on a distinction between the (objective) truth and (subjective) truthfulness, as well as their respective opposites: falsehood and untruthfulness. An attempt is made to discriminate between truthfulness and sincerity, to notions which capture similar phenomena but have originated in distinct scholarly traditions. Further, the author depicts untruthfulness as an internally diversified construct and teases out its main subtypes. Some light is (...) shed on overt untruthfulness and covert untruthfulness, as approached in philosophical, cognitive and pragmatic literature. The paper closes with a description of the scope of the present Special Issue entitled “New theoretical insights into untruthfulness”. (shrink)

While many studies of 'On the Concept of Irony' treat Kierkegaard's "irony" primarily from a literary perspective, "The Isolated Self" also examines irony with an eye to the fundamental problem in Kierkegaard's authorship, namely, the challenge of becoming a "self". Kierkegaard's "irony" is a cavalier way of life that seeks isolation from the other -- an isolation he considers necessary to becoming a self. At the same time, irony is said to be a hindrance to selfhood because the self fails (...) to become a part of the social world in which it resides. The book puts the existential tension of 'On the Concept of Irony' into relief and suggests how it sets the stage for the rest of Kierkegaard's authorship. The book reconstructs the horizon of understanding during Kierkegaard's time, including Hegel's interpretation of both Socratic irony and Friedrich Schlegel's romantic irony. In addition, the work explores material from the little-known Danish discussion of irony in the works of Poul Martin Møller, Johan ,Ludwig Helberg and Hans Lassen Martensen. (shrink)

Kirchhoff’s diffraction theory is introduced as a new case study in the realism debate. The theory is extremely successful despite being both inconsistent and not even approximately true. Some habitual realist proclamations simply cannot be maintained in the face of Kirchhoff’s theory, as the realist is forced to acknowledge that theoretical success can in some circumstances be explained in terms other than truth. The idiosyncrasy (or otherwise) of Kirchhoff’s case is considered.

A notion of truth as applicable to events of assertoric use ( utterances ) of a sentence token is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance seems clearly to depend on what the utterance says . This fundamental dependence seems in turn to be captured by the schema that, if an utterance u says that P , then u is true iff P . Such a schema may (...) thus be thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance truth, so much so that it seems straightforwardly to avoid the problems arising from context dependence and the semantic paradoxes which notoriously beset theories of utterance truth based on a simple disquotational schema. The paper argues that appearances are deceptive in both cases. On the one hand, the schema cannot allow for plausible if not uncontroversial non-indexical forms of context dependence, arising from the possibility that what an utterance says can be the case or not relative to different situations and that the truth of an utterance u of a sentence φ arguably depends on the truth of φ at the situation "associated" with u . On the other hand, a quantified utterance-truth variation on the liar paradox shows that the schema entails some consequence φ and at the same time the untruth of any utterance of φ; moreover, a resilient quantified propositional variation on the contingent liar paradox is offered, which only relies on resources usually employed by theories of utterance truth based on the schema. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying. This is the conflict of saying what you think is false. The chapter shows how stubbornly saying what you think is false resists analysis. In traditional analyses of lying, saying what you think is false is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But standard cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Classic puzzles about belief from Gottlob Frege and (...) Saul Kripke show that suggested amendments involving assent instead of belief do not fare better. I argue that attempts to save these analyses by appeal to guises or Fregean modes of presentation will also run into trouble. I then consider alternative approaches to untruthfulness that focus on (a) expectations for one’s act of saying/asserting and (b) the intentions involved in one’s act of saying/asserting. Here I introduce two new kinds of case, which I call “truth serum” and “liar serum” cases. Consideration of these cases reveals structural problems with intention- and expectation-based approaches as well. Taken together, the string of cases presented suggests that saying what you think is false, or being untruthful, is no less difficult and interesting a subject for analysis than lying itself. Tackling the question of what it is to say what you think is false illuminates ways in which the study of lying is intertwined with fundamental issues in the nature of intentional action. (shrink)

The well known Master Argument of ancient Stoic logician Diodorus Cronus is an argument in favour of the philosophical doctrine of fatalism. Perhaps in antiquity this argument was a subject of the most celebrated controversy about temporal truth and modality. This argument is a subject of logical analysis, especially in connection with temporal logic, also today. 1 The most elegant tense-logical formulation of the Master Argument has been given by A. N. Prior. Discreteness and irreflexivity of time are semantical (...) assumptions of Prior’s formulation of the argument. The assumption of discreness is troublesome. 2 The problem of this assumption is a subject of M. J. White’s paper “The Necessity of the Past and ModalTense Logic Incompleteness”. 3. (shrink)

Luca M. Possati, Jean Grondin, Paul Ricoeur ; Aurore Dumont, François Dosse et Catherine Goldenstein, Paul Ricoeur: penser la mémoire ; Paul-Gabriel Sandu, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Truth of Language. Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement ; Paul Marinescu, Marc-Antoine Vallée, Gadamer et Ricoeur. La conception herméneutiquedu langage ; Witold Płotka, Saulius Geniusas, Th e Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology ; Delia Popa, Annabelle Dufourcq, La dimension imaginaire du réel dans la philosophie de Husserl (...) ; Maria GyemantDenis Seron, Ce que voir veut dire. Essai sur la perception ; Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Hans Friesen, Christian Lotz, Jakob Meier, Markus Wolf, Ding und Verdinglichung. Technik- und Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der Kritischen Th eorie ; Bogdan MincăLarisa Cercel, John Stanley, Unterwegs zu einer hermeneutischen Übersetzungswissenschaft. Radegundis Stolze zu ihrem 60. Geburtstag ; Denisa Butnaru Johann Michel, Sociologie du soi. Essai d’herméneutique appliquée ; Ovidiu Stanciu, Jan Patočka, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. Trad. fr. Erika Abrams ; Mădălina Diaconu, Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen, Phänomenologie. (shrink)

Clearing philosophical ground for diagnoses of the contemporary ‘post-truth’-problematic, this article discusses the systematic and ineliminable ambivalence of claims to truth in public discourse and collective life generally, where truth cannot ultimately be disentangled from untruth. Truth becomes a problem in the relevant sense only where matters are morally-existentially charged, so that acknowledging truth threatens, e.g., loss of self-respect, and self-deception becomes tempting, individually and collectively. To the extent that our life is marked by (...) injustice and destructiveness, it is necessarily also marked by systematic falsification, a conspiracy to deny the truth about it, about us. Collective life exhibits pervasive hostility to interpersonal (moral) understanding, which is repressed through collectively established fake ‘understandings’ and regimes of respectability. The fact/opinion and fact/value distinctions function as defences against understanding, while meaning and truth are seen as things to be determined rather than understood, and the concept of representatability, how things can be made to appear, becomes central. However, standard philosophical views on truth, meaning and morality render the problematic sketched here invisible, because they effectively move – as Wittgenstein arguably realised – wholly within the collective perspective that needs to be problematised. Keywords: moral understanding, self-deception, collective life, representation, conspiracy theories, political corrrectness. (shrink)

The traditional and prevailing definition of lying is that lying is some variation or combination of: “an untruth told with intent to deceive.” I establish that this is the case, and that, as a result, contradictions and injustices arise. An alternative definition is proposed which is shown to avoid these difficulties. It is also shown that and how on the new definition the alleged “Liar paradox” is easily dissolved.

This article examines some of the key debates and interactions between the Australian government and medical profession in relation to the mental health consequences of the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers. It explores how, in a series of episodes between 2001 and 2005, each side claimed to represent accurately the ‘true’ nature of the detention system through asserting superior ‘objectivity’ and commitment to ‘scientific truth’ in their representations of the mental health of asylum seekers. Placing these debates (...) within the particular political objectives of the Liberal Party during John Howard’s term as Prime Minister, the article explores how science and medical advocacy have been characterized and made to signify larger conflicts within the Australian political arena. It shows how populist political ideas of ‘elitism’ have been used by the government to represent as ‘elitist untruths’ psychiatric research which has demonstrated a direct causal links between government border control policies and mental ill-health. (shrink)

Balancing a hermeneutic of trust with a hermeneutic of suspicion, this article develops a phenomenological description of imagination that highlights its alethic ambiguity. Imagination is an act of disclosure, without which the world of fiction and pure possibility cannot be constituted. Imagination is also an act of self-indulgence and narcissism, the source of much concealment and untruth. It is not the one or the other, but both at the same time, essentially ambiguous because of its phenomenological constitution. In this (...) article, I will take some steps towards clarifying this essential ambiguity of the imagination by drawing on the insights of Husserl and Sartre. Beginning with Husserl’s parallel treatment of imagination and perception as intuitive, objectifying acts, I will argue, drawing on insights from Sartre, that there is an important discrepancy between them with respect to the role of desire. While the constitution of perceptual presence is inseparable from a desire for truth, the desire involved in the constitution of imaginary presence has an ambiguous character, both epistemic and magical. This duplicity of desire partly accounts for the ambiguity of imagination, which is all the more pronounced the more the imagination demands the full emotional involvement of the imagining subject. (shrink)

We explored whether children could apply linguistic strategies for lying, i.e., manipulating linguistic content of speech to mislead others. We announced a knowledge-test entailing prizes in the classrooms of a primary school and a middle school. Altogether 79 Chinese children (6-18 years) voluntarily participated in the test: listening to a series of animal sounds before guessing the names of the animals. Meanwhile, behind the participants, a video was playing images that ostensibly corresponded to the sounds being played. In fact, this (...) was not necessarily the case, i.e., some items cannot be solved because the sounds played are not from any animal but machine-synthesized. Participants were instructed not to look back at the video. However, 51 children peeked at the video for the unsolvable items, although the peeking behavior decreased with age. Moreover, when explaining how they correctly guessed the unsolvable items, children as young as six years old were able to apply a linguistic strategy (i.e., "capability attribution") for lying. Besides "capability attribution", Children also applied "fortune attribution" and "topic shift" for lying. Finally, "fortune attribution" and "topic shift" increased with age. Therefore, educators need to be aware that children are able to apply verbal strategies for lying that could involve truthful statements (i.e., "topic shift") or statements that are difficult to be proved as untruthful (i.e., "fortune attribution"). (shrink)

There is an ongoing investigation by scholars of ethics and economics into whether human decision making and the resultant acts should be guided by rules and procedures or by judgment and discretion. Although each of these modes offers advantages and disadvantages to decision makers, they are by no means neutral in their effect on professional development. The paper presents an in-depth view of discretionary decisions using an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework. This is the first of the series of papers which focus (...) on the application of realistic philosophical principles to ethical professional behaviour and decision making in daily practice. Results indicate that classical philosophical theories which use virtues and truth as indispensable components still may give rise to desirable and moral conduct among individuals who apply them. (shrink)

Prior has conjectured that the tense-logical system Gli obtained by adding to a complete basis for the classical propositional calculus the primitive symbolG, the definitionsDf. F:Fα=NGNαDf. L:Lα=KαGα,and the postulatesis complete for the logic of linear, infinite, transitive, discrete future time. In this paper it is demonstrated that that conjecture is correct and it is shown that Gli has the finite model property: see [4]. The techniques used are in part suggested by those used in Bull [2] and [3]:Gli can be (...) shown to be complete for the logic of linear, infinite, transitive, discrete future time in the sense that every formula of Gli which is true of such time can be proved as a theorem of Gli. For this purpose the notion of truth needs to be formalized. This formalization is effected by the construction of a model for linear, infinite, transitive, discrete future time. (shrink)

The hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four defends a seemingly modest claim: "There was truth and there was untruth."1 It may be incoherent to deny this, but, as the novel shows, those who set no store in truth will not be browbeaten by contradictions. Orwell's last novel reflects his conviction that a commitment to "objective truth" was fast disappearing from the world—a prospect that troubled him more than bombs.2 Truth meant little in this "age of (...) lies" and was neither the aim nor horizon of intellectual debate (CW, 17, p. 11). Standards of rationality were opportunistically enlisted and jettisoned in the service of particular ends. Politics, he concluded, was "a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and .. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical discussion of personal identity has centered on refinements and defenses of the “psychological continuity theory”—the view that identity is created by the links between present and past provided by autobiographical experience memories. This view is structured in such a way that these memories must be seen as providing simple connections between two discrete, well-defined moments of consciousness. There is, however, a great deal of evidence—both introspective and empirical—that autobiographical memory often does not provide such links, but instead summarizes, (...) and condenses life experiences into, a coherent narrative. A brief exploration of some of the mechanisms of this summarizing and condensing work furthers the philosophical discussion of personal identity by showing why a view with the structure of the psychological continuity theory will not work, and by illuminating the role of autobiographical memory in the constitution of personal identity. (shrink)

In this study, I examine Susan Taubes’s criticism of Heidegger’s Seinsdenken that pivots around her contention that he absolutized the nothingness of being in a manner that is analogous to but yet significantly different than the role assigned to the Godhead on the part of many mystical visionaries. The common denominator is in Heidegger’s insistence on being to the neglect of fully engaging with the rhythms of life. As a consequence, there is no purchase on the chaotic, which falls outside (...) the purview of what can be signified, and in the absence of the unsignifiable, there can be no signification. Every attempt to reconstruct the broken world into a totality contains the flaw of an ontological untruth. The effort at totalization is not only the methodological weakness of tragedy and mysticism, but it is also the nihilistic basis of the role accorded to the nothingness of being in Heidegger’s Seinsdenken. The erroneous nature of the world is not denied by Susan, but she struggled to uphold the ontological untruth that what is most wrong in our existence is what is most precious. The paradoxical retrieval of the truth of this untruth affords the poetic soul the opportunity to confront the limit by breaking it, an infringement of boundary that is redolent equally with the enduring transience of love and the transient endurance of death. (shrink)

This paper examines the Gricean view that quality maxims take priority over other conversational maxims. It is shown that Gricean conversational implicatures are routinely inferred from utterances that are recognized to be untruthful. It is argued that this observation falsifies Grice’s original claim that hearers assume that speakers are obeying other maxims only if the speaker is assumed to be obeying quality maxims, and furthermore the related claim that hearers assume that speakers are being cooperative only to the extent that (...) they assume they are being truthful. (shrink)

"Why do we lie? What types of lies are there? What are the consequences of lying? What methods are used to detect lies? And when is it okay or even good to lie? From forgeries and hoaxes to plagiarism and placebos, [this book] offers historical anecdotes, scientific studies, and sociocultural analyses to help unpack the complex world of untruths"--Amazon.com.

Background: Notwithstanding near-universal agreement on the theoretical importance of truthfulness, empirical research has documented gaps between ethical norms and physician behaviors. Although prior research has explored situations in which physicians may not be truthful with patients, it has focused on contexts within specialty practice. In this article, we report on a qualitative study of truthfulness in primary care. Methods: We conducted a qualitative study during December 2014–March 2015 involving both focus groups and in-depth, semistructured interviews with 32 primary care physicians (...) from the Boston, MA, and Baltimore, MD, metro areas in three specialties: internal medicine, family practice, and pediatrics. Interviews and focus groups were led using a semistructured guide, which explored situations in which primary care physicians find it difficult to be honest with patients; factors shaping truthfulness; and rationales for truthful and untruthful communication. Results: While physicians described outright lying to patients as rare, other deviations from truthfulness were not uncommon, including slanting and deliberately withholding information. Physicians described a range of factors as influencing truthfulness, from patient-level characteristics such as educational background to societal considerations including avoiding unnecessary tests and procedures. Physicians described truthfulness as an ethical requirement, deviations from which required further justification. Perceived justifications included promoting patient well-being and avoiding harm. Conclusions: Our results suggest a potential need to augment opportunities for training in “everyday ethics” challenges, such as the appropriateness of deception in response to patient requests for inappropriate tests or pain medications. Furthermore, they indicate that, in various circumstances encountered in primary care, physicians perceive other moral duties as potentially in conflict with the duty of truthfulness. Further ethical analysis should focus on identifying when deviations from complete truthfulness do and do not serve patients' interests, to guide physicians in striking a reasonable balance among principles of medical ethics that may conflict with one another. (shrink)

This paper argues that Tugendhat's critique of Heidegger's existential conception of truth as disclosedness is usually misunderstood. The main claim of this paper is that Tugendhat insists against Heidegger on certain conventional features of truth such as conformity of the law of non-contradiction, not because he adheres to an ideal of truth as correctness; rather, he proposes an alternative existential conception of truth in terms of an active, critical or self-critical, engagement with untruth. Various recent (...) objections to Tugendhat's critique of Heidegger are discussed against the background of his alternative and are rejected. The paper concludes by outlining several challenges to Tugendhat's alternative existential conception of truth. (shrink)

Does the truth interfere with our ability to respond deceptively? We consider this question by examining the effects of task set (i.e. selecting truthful or untruthful responses), both by comparing two presentations of the same task, and through transfer to a different task. All participants carried out the task under instructions to respond correctly, and also to respond incorrectly (Experiment 1), or instructions to respond truthfully and also to respond deceptively (Experiment 2); order of instructions was counterbalanced. In Experiment (...) 2, after completing the main task, participants also performed a Stroop task. The findings suggested that deceptive responses took longer overall, regardless of order of instructions. Moreover, experience of responding deceptively versus truthfully led to faster responding on a subsequent Stroop test. Whilst there may well be processes unique to deceptive responding, the evidence suggests that overcoming interference is a process shared by deceptive as well as non-deceptive tasks. (shrink)

We investigate the properties of Yablo sentences and for- mulas in theories of truth. Questions concerning provability of Yablo sentences in various truth systems, their provable equivalence, and their equivalence to the statements of their own untruth are discussed and answered.

Communication of all sorts is passed off as "truth," when in fact it is a collection of varying degrees of truth, half-truth, and untruth. This article seeks to put the semantic spaciousness of the word truth into a more comprehensive context. It does so through construction of a continuum of terms, divided into four practical categories - (a) intent to be open and fully honest, (b) intent to be honest but with selective use of information, (...) (c) use of untruths but with no intent to deceive, and (d) conscious intent to deceive. Analysis of the categories relates each to degrees of ethical behavior of the communicator. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein’s conception of religious belief was profound, but this hasn’t so far been given the attention it deserves . Although Wittgenstein wrote comparatively little on the subject, while the whole of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre has a religious theme, both philosophers have become notorious for refusing to construe religious belief in either of the two traditional ways: as a ‘propositional attitude’ on the one hand or as a mere ‘emotional response’ with no reference to the ‘real world’ on the (...) other. This refusal to play by the orthodox dichotomies, as it were, has led to gross misrepresentation of their thought by numerous commentators. Neither Wittgenstein nor Kierkegaard has been immune to allegations of both ‘relativism’ and ‘fideism’, although neither charge could be wider of the mark. It is not that Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard reject the role that reason has to play in both religion and philosophy, but that they try to undermine from within certain common assumptions about the nature of both religious faith and the point of philosophical activity that make us believe that the traditional dichotomies exhaust all the available options. What I hope to show in this paper is that more sense can be made of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on religion, if we juxtapose them with Kierkegaard’s religious thought, especially that of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym , Johannes Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The focal point of this paper is going to be the attempt to read what little Wittgenstein has to say about this topic through the lens of Climacus’ claim that ‘objectively there is no truth; an objective knowledge about the truth or the truths of Christianity is precisely untruth.’ I will begin by giving a brief exposition of Climacus’ views, will then sketch out what Wittgenstein has to say on the matter and will then attempt to bring the two together. In the remainder of the paper I will assess the implications of Wittgenstein’s and Kierkegaard’s conception as well as address some of the problems that their account might be said to engender. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth holds that each true sentence corresponds to a discrete fact. Donald Davidson and others have argued (using an argument that has come to be known as the slingshot) that this theory is mistaken, since all true sentences correspond to the same “Great Fact.” The argument is designed to show that by substituting logically equivalent sentences and coreferring terms for each other in the context of sentences of the form ‘P corresponds to the fact that (...) P’ every true sentence can be shown to correspond to the same facts as every other true sentence. The claim is that all substitution of logically equivalent sentences and coreferring terms takes place salva veritate. I argue that the substitution of coreferring terms in this context need not preserve truth. The slingshot fails to refute the correspondence theory. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a reconstruction of the concept of hidden inwardness that argues that the concept refers to ethico-religious characters that are expressed in deeds and words, rather than a private inner world. By relying on the distinction between morality and legality, I argue that “hidden inwardness” is not compatible with all kinds of behavior and that it is better described negatively than positively. The concept of hidden inwardness need therefore not be as problematic as is often assumed, since it (...) mainly involves the idea that we do not know hearts and minds. Still, Kierkegaard’s later works use “hidden inwardness” in a different manner than the earlier pseudonymous writings. However, I argue that this change in use of the term involves more a change of emphasis, which prevents misuses of “hidden inwardness,” than any significant change of theoretical position. Finally, I show that “hidden inwardness” sheds light on the controversial theses “Subjectivity is truth” and “Subjectivity is untruth” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (shrink)

Most of Heidegger’s readings of early and classical Greek texts are unconventional by traditional philosophical and philological standards. The present reading of Plato is no exception. Heidegger suggests that the “essence of truth is what first allows the essence of man to be grasped” and “the man whose liberation is depicted in the allegory is set out into the truth.” But since such “setting out” is the very “mode of his existence, the fundamental occurrence of his Dasein,” the (...) allegory is not chiefly about the essence of truth but, as already noted, rather about “an occurrence happening ‘in man’, that is, in his history”. The real novelty of Heidegger’s reading, however, is his conclusion that the “decisive result of the interpretation of the cave allegory... [is] the insight that the question concerning the essence of truth as unhiddenness must be transformed into the question concerning untruth”, that is, “that untruth belongs to the essence of truth”. For this reason Heidegger’s course takes a turn to a passage in the Theaetetus, which he dramatically characterizes as “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod”. While the dialogue is generally taken to be about knowledge, for Heidegger it is about untruth. (shrink)

This paper responds to Tugendhat's well-known and influential critique of Heidegger's concept of truth with the resources of Heidegger's texts, in particular §44 of Being and Time. To start with, Tugendhat's primary critical argument is reconstructed. It is held to consist firstly in the charge of ambiguity against Heidegger's formulations of his concept of truth and secondly in the claim that Heidegger's concept of truth is incompatible with an adequate concept of falsehood. It is shown that the (...) supposedly ambiguous meanings are, on the one hand, in fact clearly distinguished by Heidegger and, on the other, that they merely amount to different extensions of the same meaning of truth. It is then shown how this concept of truth is indeed compatible with an adequate, albeit post-metaphysical, concept of falsehood. Finally, the grounds of falsehood in the untruth of the existential of Verfallen are pursued and further objections are dismissed. (shrink)

What the Sorites has to tell us is a simple truth regarding our categories. It appears to saddle us with something other than a simple truth—something worse, a contradiction or a problem or a paradox—only when we insist on viewing it through a discrete logic of categories. Discrete categories and discrete logic are for robots. We aren’t robots, and the simple truth is that we don’t handle categories in the way any discrete logic would demand. For us (...) non-robots, what the Sorites has to offer is a straightforward truth regarding how incapable robots and their logic are of handling categories like ours. (shrink)