Heidegger’s Concept of Truth by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (review)

488 BOOK REVIEWS this question? In a word, when we read the Commentary, how do we know whether we are presented with Aquinas's own opinion or with his understanding of Aristotle? A diachronic study of some of the themes present in the Commentary as they are developed in Thomas's other writings, such as the one Doig undertakes in chapter 4, seems to be a path toward answering these questions. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. TOBIAS HOFFMANN Heidegger's Concept of Truth. By DANIEL 0. DAHLSTROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 462. $60.00 (doth). ISBN 0-52164317 -1. In this ambitious, learned, and highly informative contribution to the interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy, Daniel Dahlstrom's objective "is to elaborate Heidegger's early conception of truth (formulated in the Marburg lectures and in Being and Time) as it proceeds from his critique of a particular history of the logical prejudice" (xviii). This prejudice is the thesis "that the genuine 'locus' of truth is the judgment" or that "truth is to be understood primarily in terms of assertions and in view of the presence of what is asserted" (xvii). The role of judgments or assertions in the logical prejudice takes various related forms: "Truth has been characterized as itself a judgment, as a property of an assertion or judgment, or as a relation between a judgment and a reality, or even as the confirmation or confirmability of such a relation" (xvii). Heidegger sought to demonstrate that such conceptions of truth, central to the Western tradition of metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, conceal a more fundamental sense of truth as the "disdosedness of being-here (Da-Sein)" whose essence is "timeliness" (Dahlstrom's translation of Zeitlichkeit) or the comportment of "care" as being-here's authentic self-projection ahead of itself toward death (390). Heidegger undertook this critique on three fronts, simultaneously engaging the accounts of truth, being, and time that anchor the logical prejudice (xviii, 392). As Dahlstrom clarifies near the end of his treatise, the true target of Heidegger's critique is not logic or logical accounts of truth, but rather "the impropriety of an unrestricted extension of ... a certain interpretation of 'being' and its cognates in the context of logic" (449). In question is the interpretation of being as "presence" or as entities "on hand," and the corresponding account of truth as the disclosure of beings, thus understood, in assertions that are BOOK REVIEWS 489 likewise "on hand" or always available for human purposes of knowing and acting. In Heidegger's analysis the traditional accounts of being and truth are inseparable. Even so, Dahlstrom's careful retelling of the genesis of Heidegger's first full statement of his thought (Being and Time, 1927), places the emphasis on Heidegger's exposure and critique of "decisions" about the nature of truth made by his great predecessors, especially Husserl and Aristotle. And in that retelling, it is not apparent that logic or the account of truth required by logic (the logical prejudice) is the ultimate culprit in the traditional distortions of truth. Indeed, Dahlstrom shows that Heidegger's diagnosis of the distortions always traces these back to fundamental and unexamined assumptions about being. A certain ambiguity lurks therefore in the central thesis of this study. Is the chief problem in the Western tradition the distortion of being into presence by the account of truth as the logical prejudice, or the distortion of truth into the logical prejudice by the account of being as presence? Noting that Heidegger frequently disparages formal logic as having an ontological commitment to being as presence, Dahlstrom remarks on the oddity of Heidegger's blindness to something obvious: the primary theme of formal logic is possibility in which, to be sure, the actual (presence) is not privileged over the possible. Indeed Heidegger makes no convincing case for his daim that logic necessarily has the stated ontological commitment (447). But as Dahlstrom's own presentation makes evident, Heidegger is not truly interested in defending that view, but rather is centrally concerned with showing how Western metaphysics (in the interpretation of being as ousia) leads to a certain view of logos (assertion as "apophantic") from which...