Session Nine: The Essence of Truth, 194-215 

 Place: Zoom 

Dates: Friday October 3, 10, 17, 24, and 31 and November 7, 14, and 21, 2025 

Time: 17.00-19.00 (CET). 

Fee: 80 Euro, 60 Euro for patrons, and 40 Euro for students and low income. Participants can receive a certificate of participation. You can attend the first session for free. 

Literature: 

Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth. On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, London 2002. 

Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (GA 34), Frankfurt am Main 1988. 

From the editor´s afterword (GA 34, 333): This text reproduces the text of the first lecture, which was given for two hours under the title “On the Essence of Truth” in the winter semester of 1931/32 at the University of Freiburg. It began on October 27, 1931, and ended on February 26, 1932. The lecture was preceded by a lecture of the same title, written in 1930 and delivered several times, which appeared in print in 1943 and has also been available in “Wegmarken” since 1967 (now GA Vol. 9, pp. 177-202). The topic was taken up again in a modified form and with a new, more detailed introduction in the lecture of the winter semester of 1933/34, which will be published in Volumes 36/37 of the Complete Works. The line of thought in the text “Plato's Doctrine of Truth” (GA Vol. 9, pp. 203-238), which was developed in 1940 and first published in 1942 in the yearbook "Spiritual Tradition" and then in 1947 together with the “Letter on Humanism” (GA Vol. 9, pp. 203-238), also goes back to the lecture given in the winter semester of 1931/32 (not 1930/31, ibid. p. 483), but is limited to the Allegory of the Cave. To highlight these connections, the text of the lecture now presented appears with the subtitle “On Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Theaetetus.” The logic lecture of the Marburg winter semester 1925/26, which received the subtitle “The Question of Truth” in the complete works (GA 21), briefly referred (p. 168 f.) to Plato's significance for the history of the concept of truth, but dealt more extensively with Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant. The first interpretations of the Allegory of the Cave and the "Theaetetus,” proceeding differently than the later ones, were presented in the summer semester of 1926 in the lecture “Fundamental Concepts of Ancient Philosophy” GA 22); cf. 1927 “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology” (GA 24, pp. 400-405).