Graeme Nicholson, Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2019, 15,5 × 23,1 cm, xi-181 p., ISBN 978-1-4875-0441-0

Nicholson’s Heidegger on Truth is best described as a detailed commentary on Heidegger’s Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (hereafter WW), proceeding methodically, slowly, tracing the various corners and arcs (p. 14) in Heidegger’s thought. As is well known, following Heidegger’s pathways of thinking (Denkwege) is not always easy. To the untrained reader he appears to meander aimlessly, moving from one idea to the next and circling back as if lost. In order to get us thinking, or to think through a question with him, Heidegger offers us only signposts, Wegmarken, along the way, like the ones we might find along the trails surrounding his writing hut in the Black Forest. Nicholson enables the reader to navigate Heidegger’s path by leaving a more discernible trail of white pebbles. The central notion that Nicholson attempts to develop in this book is that “truth is the medium in which all human experience occurs.” In Heideggerian fashion, he asks us to recall the analogy Plato offers in the Republic – “as light permits objects to be visible and the eye to see, so truth permits genuine beings to be intelligible and our nous to understand” (p. 3). When most readers think of Heidegger on truth, especially in connection with the Greeks, they will recall his account of truth as alētheia or unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) – the “historical” essence of truth. As Nicholson explains in the Introduction, this is one of three themes regarding the essence of truth that we find in Heidegger’s writings. The others are truth as correspondence – the “usual” concept of truth – and untruth, which belongs to the essence of truth in the forms of concealment and error. Heidegger’s aim in WW is to show how these three themes are connected. Perhaps the most difficult turn to follow in his train of thought is the notion that “the essence of truth is freedom” (p. 39). It is here that Heidegger opens up the possibility to move from the correspondence theory to truth as unconcealment, as well as the idea that the untrue is part of the essence of truth. In the 1949 text of WW, this idea of freedom is worked out more thoroughly in terms of Ereignis, which Nicholson renders as en-owning. If one does not follow this turn, then the shift from talking about the truth of statements and propositions to the coming into view of things, things coming forth into their own, the opening up for the experience or appearance of being, and so on, would appear to have no grounding. Before guiding us through Heidegger’s discussions of correspondence, unconcealment, and untruth, Nicholson begins by differentiating the myriad writings titled Vom Wesen der Wahrheit that Heidegger authored from 1930 to 1949. WW began as a series of four separate addresses delivered in 1930 (now published in GA 80.1). The topic was then taken up in lecture courses in Freiburg in WS 1931/32 – Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (GA 34) – and WS 1933/34 – Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (GA 36/37). The first print edition of WW was published by Klostermann in 1943, followed by a second edition in 1949 to which Heidegger added a concluding note (§9). As Nicholson notes, the 1943 edition of WW was one of the first works by Heidegger to be translated into English, included in Existence and Being (1949) along with his 1943 address on Hölderlin’s poem “Homecoming,” the 1936 address on “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” and the 1929 inaugural lecture “What is Metaphysics?” In 1958, Marvin …