Close Reading (Preview) - Heidegger on Truth

Mark Linsenmayer and Seth Paskin read and interpret Martin Heidegger’s essay “On the Essence of Truth” (1943), first half.

This is a 17-minute preview of a two-hour, 38-minute bonus recording, which you can purchase at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase it at iTunes Store: Search for “Partially Heidegger Truth.”

A Close Reading is us going line-by-line through a text trying to figure out what’s being said, which less much less agonizing than it sounds.

We’ve covered another later Heidegger essay, but had a hard time really making sense of his vocabulary, and so the Close Reading strategy is ideal for helping us (and you!) decode this difficult thinker.

Heidegger thinks that the traditional correspondence theory of truth somehow begs the question of what truth actually is. For Heidegger, the truth of sentences is derivative of the truth of beings, e.g. the difference between true gold and false gold is more fundamental than the sentence “this gold is true gold” being true or false. So what makes us call true gold true? Listen and see if you think Heidegger can give an alternative account that’s more informative than correspondence theory and which doesn’t itself somehow rely on the notion of truth. You may well want to throw up your hands and say that truth is simply fundamental and undefinable… but then I bet you’d say the same about being, wouldn’t you? Heidegger wouldn’t. #heidegger #truth #Being Go to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/02/23/close-reading-heidegger-truth/