ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger sees the pre-Socratics as thinkers with an immediate access to being, thinkers deposed and betrayed by Plato, if the author understands the pre-Socratics to differ in their relationship to such matters as truth and history. In Plato's representation of the attaining of truth, 'everything depends upon the shining of the phenomenon and the possibility of its visibleness'. Heidegger calls his essay on Plato's allegory of the cave 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth' and argues that Plato transforms the pre-Socratic philosophers' relationship to truth, substituting for their experience of being's unveiling a modelling of truth as a sort of paradigm, a mental or visual idea. Although Heidegger shares Plato's view about the difficulty of knowing truth, its hiddenness and inaccessibility, the necessity of force in leading a student towards truth. It is this conviction that truth is located in another space that seems to the author compatible with the Athenian practice of torture.
