The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16.4 (2002) 297-300

Heidegger's Concept of Truth. Daniel Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxx + 462 pp. $59.95 hard copy, 0-521-64317-1.

One of the bold claims advanced in this book is that many of the immanent criticisms of Heidegger's project stem from a failure to adequately understand the role and meaning of truth in that project. Daniel Dahlstrom has written a highly accomplished and detailed scholarly account of the scope and consequences of [End Page 297] Heidegger's radical engagement during the 1920s with "the logical prejudice," that is, the assumption "that assertions and their kin are the site of truth" (xvi). Dahlstrom's recognition of Heidegger's "more fundamental" truth of the disclosedness of Dasein is, of course, nothing new. What the book claims to contribute to our understanding of Heidegger's concept of truth consists rather in the claim that the account of ontological truth succeeds only insofar as the ultimate relation between truth as disclosedness and propositional truth is understood to be a relation, not of subordination, but of "a tacit but unexplained complementarity" (xviii).

Dahlstrom divides his text into five chapters, four of which deal with some form of how truth is understood. The first chapter focuses on Lotze's logical conception of truth, which cemented the logical prejudice in the minds of Germany's early twentieth-century philosophers (10). On Lotze's account, truth is not a thing, not an event (i.e., judging), not a relation. Instead, he conceives of truth as a property of judgment (viz., its validity or Geltung), which is irreducible to any other kind of reality. While acknowledging the importance of Lotze's work on the issue, Heidegger ultimately faults him for failing to explain and distinguish adequately the specific actuality or being of truth (41ff.). In the second chapter, Dahlstrom examines Husserl's phenomenological conception of truth. Through his accounts of intentionality, categorial intuition, and the original sense of the a priori, Husserl deserves much of the credit for making it possible to clarify truth's "actuality." With the analyses of categorial intuitions and nonrelating acts, Husserl recognizes that truth cannot be adequately understood to belong exclusively to assertions. Truth instead becomes "the identity of the object that is at the same time meant and given" (Husserl 1968, 126). Moreover, this identity is experienced prior to being thematically grasped as such. Despite this advance, however, Heidegger criticizes Husserl for failing, like Lotze, to clarify the meaning of being as well as the relation between the being of intentionality and the being of entities.

Dahlstrom turns in Chapter 3 to the hermeneutic understanding of truth, which Heidegger gleans through a radical engagement with Aristotle's thought. Taking Aristotle's insights into the synthetic-diairetic structure underlying the truth and falsity of assertions, Heidegger distinguishes between the apophantic "as"-structure of the assertion and the hermeneutic "as"-structure constituting our primary, practical "uncovering" of entities. Retrieving "the most authentic sense" of the truth of being found in Metaphysics Theta, Heidegger sees in Aristotle's account an understanding of truth as the presupposition of any uncovering and concealing, whether of an assertoric or practical nature. Chapter 4 focuses on the existential conception of truth laid out in Being and Time. After identifying Heidegger's fundamental thesis of the work—namely, "Time is the sense of being, while truth, in the original sense of the term, is the disclosure of this sense" (224)—Dahlstrom presents the "premises" of the argument supporting this thesis. This involves Dahlstrom in a detailed examination of the major issues [End Page 298] familiar to all readers of Heidegger's opus. Thus, "concern," "solicitude," "palaver" (Gerede), "care," "conscience," and "resoluteness" are all read as premises along the way to Heidegger's establishment of his thesis on truth, time, and being. At the end of his account, Dahlstrom nods to those more inclined to "formalistic argumentation" by beautifully and succinctly summarizing Heidegger's entire argument as a series of three hypothetical syllogisms and a single modus ponens...