Date of Award

12-1980

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Philosophy

Supervisor

G. B. Madison

Abstract

In Plato's Doctrine of the Truth (PLW), Martin Heidegger argues that Plato, in the Republic, yokes truth to a preconceived notion of logical and moral rightness. This yoke is a result, Heidegger argues, of Plato's basic orientation towards beings. For Plato the essential characteristic of beings, so runs the argument in PLW, lies in the [symbol removed], a being's whatness, its essential nature. Heidegger maintains that Plato is wrong in so characterizing beings, since unhiddeness [symbol removed] and not whatness is the primordial characteristic (Grundzug) of beings. Heidegger further argues that Plato holds a Correspondence Theory of Truth, that for Plato [symbol removed] is really [symbol removed] (rightness), and that [symbol removed] is the correspondence [symbol removed] of the correct [symbol removed] to the right [symbol removed].

In PLW we find Heidegger in the midst of a contemporary philosophical debate, more or less on the side of those who expound, in multifarious ways, the existentialist's l'existence précède l'essence, while opposing the so-called Platonic-Scholastic Essentia antecedit Existentiam. My purpose in this thesis is twofold: first I show how Heidegger's thesis in PLW is based on his alethology in Being and Time (SZ), and secondly I show how Heidegger, by neglecting the role that to agathon plays as the originating locus [symbol removed] of aletheia, misconstrues the notion of truth put forth in the Republic.


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