The question of ground and the truth of being: Heidegger's WS 1931/2 lecture course 'Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Hoeblengleichnis und Theaetet'

Recent availability of texts in Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe have called into question the longstanding paradigm that has guided the interpretation of Heidegger's writings and the understanding of his philosophical project as a whole. This paradigm is based on a conception of the Kehre, the turning, as a developmental shift from the primacy of the human being to the primacy of being in Heidegger's thinking that took place in the 1930s and that marks the distinction between the "early" and the "later" Heidegger. The publication of Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, composed in 1936--38, challenges this conception by characterizing the turning not as a developmental shift but rather as the reciprocal movement of being's need for the human being and the human being's belonging to being, which constitutes Ereignis, enowning, as the dynamic relation that makes possible the givenness of beings. This dissertation is an attempt to elucidate the meaning of the turning in enowning that must hold a central place in the development of a new paradigm for Heidegger interpretation.; The dissertation begins with Heidegger's directive that the question of truth is a way of access to the question of the ground of the givenness of beings and his further identification of Plato's allegory of the cave as the moment in the history of philosophy that may serve as a proper introduction to the question of truth in its primordiality. It then engages the question of aletheia, truth, developed in the interpretation of Plato's allegory of the cave that Heidegger presented in his 1931-32 winter semester lectures at Freiburg. In the dissertation I show how Heidegger's interpretation of aletheia in Plato exemplifies "turning thinking" as the thinking of "turning relations" wherein the relation itself grounds and makes possible what is related in it. Such thinking, I maintain, is prefigured in Being and Time (1927) and fulfilled in Contributions to Philosophy (1936--38) as the thinking of the turning in enowning. The dissertation proceeds by carrying out the explicit application of the later account of the turning in Contributions to the lecture course on truth in order to reflexively illuminate both Heidegger's interpretation of Plato's allegory and the meaning of the turning.