Abstract
Heidegger develops his reading of a-lētheia as privative un-concealment (Unverborgenheit) in tandem
with his early phenomenological theory of truth. He is not simply reinterpreting a word, but rather
reading Greek philosophy as having a primordial understanding of truth which has itself been concealed
in interpretation. After shedding medieval and modern presuppositions of truth as correspondence, the
existential truth-experience shows itself, no longer left puzzlingly implicit in unsatisfactory conventional
readings of Greek philosophy. In Sein und Zeit §44, Heidegger resolves interpretive difficulties in
Parmenides through his interpretation of alētheia and philologically grounds this reading in Heraclitus’s
description of the unconcealing logos. Although this primordial sense of the word has already been
obscured in Plato and Aristotle, the structural gradation of their theories of truth conserves the
primordial pre-Socratic sense of truth as the experience of unconcealment.