The Measure of Truth

Abstract

Drawing on ideas identified in Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter begins the process of developing a new understanding of the issues raised in Chapters 3 and 4. It explains how Heidegger's engagement with Husserl's understanding of ‘constitution’ and of truth gives rise to the notion of a ‘measure’ — a ‘constituting’ form of understanding that makes it possible for us to identify entities. The chapter illustrates how this idea finds expression in Heidegger's work by exploring the Logik lectures’ reflections on the need for a prethematic ‘Hinblick’. Those reflections suggest a skeleton upon which we can arrange central themes of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, including Being-in-the-world, its critique of scepticism, and its controversial views on truth and the correspondence theory in particular. So interpreted, that ontology invites a number of obvious objections (in particular that it leads us to a form of idealism) — objections that subsequent chapters address.