ABSTRACT
The English word ‘philosophy’ is derived from a Greek word that means ‘love of wisdom’. But wisdom is nothing without a love of truth. From the most ancient times, this love of truth has provoked the philosophical mind, moving it to question what others take for granted and to think what calls for thought. The question of truth is at the center of Heidegger’s philosophical reflections. Even Heidegger’s earliest work expressed his concern for truth. This concern turned him around and led him back to antiquity, to the Greeks. In the texts of the Greeks, he encountered the word aletheia. The hermeneutical interpretation of this word, a word that for a long time has been translated as ‘truth’, made him question and rethink the modern experience of truth. Even before Being and Time, Heidegger had already been arguing that another meaning of ‘truth’ was concealed in the Greek word: a meaning which the Greeks themselves apparently did not experience and think. Except, perhaps, for Herakleitos, whose teachings proclaimed that ‘nature loves to hide’, they understood the word to mean ‘correctness’: truth in the sense of ‘correctness’, a satisfying representation of reality. On the basis of this insight, Heidegger insisted on an essential difference between truth as correctness and truth as opening or unconcealment – the hermeneutical meaning he saw hidden in the more common meaning of the familiar word.
