¹ This is especially true of English-language scholarship: John Caputo, for instance, insists that because for Aquinas ‘truth is the name we give to Being when Being enters into relation with intellect,’ no rapprochement is possible between the two accounts (Caputo, John, Heidegger and Aquinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 202Google Scholar). Though he acknowledges that truth is a more promising topic for dialogue between them, Laurence Hemming is similarly resistant to the view that significant agreement is possible (Heidegger's Atheism (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 104Google Scholar) (see also his ‘In Matters of Truth: Heidegger and Aquinas,’ in Kerr, Fergus, ed., Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation (London: Press, SCM, 2003), pp. 85–10Google Scholar); and Jan Aertsen has repeatedly stressed their asymmetry in matters of truth (see Aertsen, Jan, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden, New York & Köln: E.J. Brill, 1996), pp. 264–265CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Aertsen, Jan, ‘Truth in the Middle Ages: Its Essence and Power in Christian Thought’, in Pritzl, Kurt, ed., Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), p. 140Google Scholar). By contrast, early German responses to Heidegger tend perhaps to overplay the commonalities between Thomistic verum and Heideggerian aletheiology (this is especially true in the treatments of Bernhard Welte, Gustav Siewerth and Johannes Lotz).

² “Being” will be capitalised where (i) a reference to Heidegger's notion of Sein is intended and/or (ii) the ontological difference has a bearing on the point that is being advanced.

³ The first instance is to be found Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953)Google Scholar; trans. Robinson, Edward and Macquarrie, John, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)Google Scholar, §4, p. 14 / p. 34 (the pagination for each text refers to the German and English editions respectively); the second is in SZ §44, p. 214 / p. 257 (both of these refer to De Veritate q.1, a.1); and the third reference in SZ §1, p. 3 / p. 22, is to ST II q.94, a.2. No commentator seems to have drawn attention to this point, which is perhaps symptomatic of the tendency in comparative work on Heidegger and Aquinas to concentrate the debate on the concept of Being to the relative exclusion of truth.

⁴ E.g. SZ, §7, p. 38 / p. 62: ‘Being is the transcendens pure and simple … Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis.’

⁵ Heidegger, Martin, “Rückgang auf die scholastische Ontologie: das verum esse bei Thomas von Aquin,” in Einführung in die Phänomenologische Forschung (Gesamtausgabe 17; Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1994)Google Scholar; trans. Dahlstrom, Daniel, “Going Back to Scholastic Ontology: the verum esse in Thomas Aquinas,” in Introduction to Phenomenological Research (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶ Heidegger, Martin, Logik: die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Gesamtausgabe 21; Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1976)Google Scholar; trans. Sheehan, Thomas, Logic: The Question of Truth (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁷ So far as I can tell, Rioux is the only commentator to mention Rückgang (though he does not discuss it in any detail): see Rioux, Bernard, L’être et la vérité chez Heidegger et saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), p. 247Google Scholar.

⁸ See e.g. Dahlstrom, Daniel, Heidegger's Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, passim, and Wrathall, Mark, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 11–91Google Scholar.

⁹ An examination of the complex ways in which Heidegger's reflections on truth developed over the entire course of his career is beyond the scope of this discussion. Good accounts may be found in Wrathall, Mark, ‘Unconcealment,’ in Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Wrathall, Mark A., eds., A Companion to Heidegger (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 337–357Google Scholar, and Dahlstrom (op. cit.); Dahlstrom in particular argues for an organic consistency in his conception of truth and denies that the alleged recantation in 1964 should be taken at face-value (see Dahlstrom, Daniel, ‘The Prevalence of Truth,’ in Pritzl, Kurt, ed., Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), pp. 185–207 at pp. 204–207)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Since Heidegger (i) seems content to treat DV as an unproblematic representative of the scholastic approach to truth (see e.g. Rückgang, §29, p. 162 / p. 120) and (ii) makes no significant reference to any medieval theory except Aquinas's own discussions, this discussion will assume that his references to “scholasticism” may fairly be construed as directed towards Aquinas himself.

¹¹ This particular typology is set out in Logik, §2, p. 8. It would appear from this remark that Heidegger is alive to the fact that truth in the medieval understanding was ultimately a function of the degree to which an entity fulfilled its teleological structure.

¹² Logik, §2, p. 9.

¹³ Logik, §3, p. 10. Heidegger's criticisms seem here to be directed at Leonine Thomism, which tended to mine the Summae for catechetical and apologetic purposes alone; this interpretation of Aquinas would have been the dominant one in the intellectual atmosphere of the seminaries he attended in his formative years.

¹⁴ Logik, §3, p. 11.

¹⁵ I grant for the sake of argument that Heidegger's assumption that Aquinas’ theory of truth is indeed representative of the high-scholastic approach. The accuracy of this assumption is – needless to say – especially controverted, but must be left to one side for the purposes of this essay.

¹⁶ Logik, §11, p. 112. Cf. Logik, §13, p. 137: ‘[E]ven less did [Aristotle] invent anything like a copy-theory (Abbildtheorie) of truth. Rather, he stuck to the phenomena and understood them as broadly as possible.’

¹⁷ As a result of the significant hermeneutical tensions between Metaphysics VI.4 (truth and falsity reside not in things but in the mind) and Metaphysics IX.10 (“in the strictest sense” being and non-being denote truth and falsity), interpretations of Aristotle on this point are especially vexed. For discussions addressing the Heideggerian interpretation, see Long, Christopher, Aristotle on the Nature of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 21–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sadler, Ted, Heidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being (London: Continuum International Publishing, 1996), pp. 116–121Google Scholar.

¹⁸ SZ, §44, p. 213 / p. 256.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ SZ, §44, p. 214 / p. 257. As with many of his appeals to Greek etymology, Heidegger's rendering of Aristotle's pathemata (lit. “affections” or “experiences”) as noemata (perhaps best rendered as “mental representations”) is tendentious (see Liddell, H.G. and Scott, R., Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 (9^th ed.)), ad loc.)Google Scholar. The purpose of this sleight-of-hand is to allege that the alleged representationalism presupposed in correspondence theories is rooted in mistakenly identifying this text as containing the primary Aristotelian definition of truth.

²¹ SZ, §44, p. 216 / p. 259.

²² SZ, §44, p. 217, p. 260.

²³ Strawson, P.F., ‘Truth,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplement) 24 (1950), pp. 129–156 at p. 129Google Scholar. Heidegger's critique of what one might term the “ontological insulation” of truth endemic to representationalist versions of correspondence theory (which insist that truth is fundamentally propositional in character) – can be supported with other standard analytic objections. After all, with what proposition is the proposition that ‘truth is a function of the correspondence relation between P and F’ itself intended to correspond? And even if such a proposition were to be found, how could it provide its own account of a truth-making correspondence relation with respect to itself that did not trigger an infinite regress of serially corresponding propositions?

²⁴ The analytic tradition may fairly be said to owe its conceptual genesis to the development by Russell and Frege of first-order predicate calculus, a system of formal logic substantively reliant on the existential qualifier derived from the Kant's attack on the ontological argument's mistaken assumption that existence is a real predicate. To that extent, I would argue that deflationism's nihilistic denial that truth is a real predicate (on this reading P is true if and only if P), together with the nominalist reduction of truth to truths which attends this move, represents a moment of consummation for the analytic tradition, one more instance of that same prejudicial mood against the medieval transcendentals that partially motivated Kant's criticisms of scholastic theology in the Transcendental Dialectic.

²⁵ SZ, §44, p. 218 / p. 261.

²⁶ SZ, §44, p. 220 / p. 263.

²⁷ SZ, §44, p. 221 / p. 263 (Heidegger's italics).

²⁸ It is important to note that the appeal to the original meaning of alētheia as “un-hiddenness” (by combining the alpha privative with lanthanein meaning “to lie hidden”) has since been conclusively rebutted (see Friedländer, Paul, Platon: Seinswahrheit und Lebenswirklichkeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964), p. 223CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

²⁹ SZ, §44, p. 229 / p. 272. Taken alongside his remarks in Rückgang and Logik, it seems reasonable to suppose that it is Aquinas who is the hidden target in this passage.

³⁰ Rückgang, §30, p. 174 / p. 129.

³¹ SZ, §44, pp. 226–227 / pp. 269–270 (Heidegger's italics).

³² SZ §44, p. 227 / p. 270. The claim that Heidegger fails malgré lui to escape a subject-oriented philosophy in SZ has been made by a number of scholars – see e.g. Blattner, William D., Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 230–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a more sympathetic rendition, see Malpas, J.E., Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 155–175CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Vallicella, William F., ‘Heidegger's Reduction of Being to Truth,’ The New Scholasticism 59/2 (1985), pp. 156–176 at p. 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Rückgang, §32, p. 185 / p. 139.

³⁵ Rückgang, §33, p. 190 / p. 143.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ It is worth noting that the formal critique of ontotheology does not come till some time later in the development of Heidegger's thought; but the shape of his criticisms here seem to me to foreshadow this later critique in a number of intriguing and inescapable ways.

³⁸ SZ, §44, p. 226 / p. 269.

³⁹ Rioux (op. cit.), p. 240: ‘L’adaequatio rei et intellectus, vécue par l'esprit humain comme ordination à manifester l’être, n'atteint sa perfection entière justifiant sa participation imparfaite dans l'homme, que dans l'identité de l’Être et de l'Esprit en Dieu.’

⁴⁰ The most well-known recent treatment isPasnau, Robert, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 195–219Google Scholar.

⁴¹ For persuasive criticisms of Pasnau's account, see O'Callaghan, John, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Towards a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003)Google Scholar, chapter 6, and Macdonald, Paul A., Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), p. 114 n. 82Google Scholar. O'Callaghan provides the most lucid treatment available of Aquinas' account of the mechanics of cognition.

⁴² Macdonald (op. cit.), p. 83. For a contemporary version of this argument, see Haldane, John, ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind,' Ratio 11/3 (1998), pp. 253–277 at pp. 267–269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 85. As Charles Taylor points out, very little of this account would be congenial to a metaphysics that finds no place for forms or formal causality (see Philosophical Arguments (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 3). Yet for present purposes it is enough to demonstrate that whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Aquinas' account, it is emphatically not a construal of truth that excludes the question of Being.

⁴⁴ DV q.1, a.2; DV q.1, a.2. Note that these are analogies of attribution and not therefore equivalent to the analogia entis. Cf. however In Sent. d.1, q.19, a.2, ad 1, in which Aquinas establishes the difference between an analogy of predication, an analogy of existence and an analogy of predication and existence. It is in the third sense, he claims, that truth applies to God and creatures (see further Wippel, John, ‘Truth in Thomas Aquinas (Part One),' Review of Metaphysics 43/2 (1989), pp. 295–326 at p. 304Google Scholar).

⁴⁵ Floucat, Yves, ‘La vérité comme conformité selon saint Thomas d'Aquin,' Revue Thomiste 104 (2004), pp. 49–102 at p. 54Google Scholar. In short, God's knowledge, the objects of that knowledge, God's self-knowledge and knowable forms are one and the same in Him (ST Ia, q.14, a.4: ‘in Deo intellectus, et id quod intelligitur, et species intelligibilis, et ipsum intelligere, sunt omnino unum et idem').

⁴⁶ See previous note and ST Ia, q.16, a.5, resp.2: truth in God meets Augustine's requirement that truth must be “likeness to a source” because God's being and intellect are identical (‘suum esse non est suo intellectui dissimile'). On Aquinas's claim that God is truth, see the – largely analytic – inquiry undertaken by Peterson, John, ‘God as Truth,' Faith and Philosophy 12/3 (1995), pp. 342–359CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁴⁷ DV q.1, a.8: ‘Veritas in rebus creatis … nihil aliud potest comprehendere quam entitatem rei, et adaequationem rei ad intellectum vel aequationem intellectus ad res vel ad privationes rerum; quod totum est a Deo.' That the symmetrical coinherence in Aquinas of intellective Richtigkeit and ontological Unverborgenheit implies a rejection of isolated subjectivity is well brought out by Johannes Lotz, ‘Aletheia und Orthotes: Versuch einer Deutung im Lichte der Scholastik,' Philosophisches Jahrbuch 68 (1959), pp. 258–268 at p. 267: ‘Bei Thomas … gibt es keine isolierte Subjecktivität hinaus, weil zur Konstitution des menschlichen Geistes die Ausrichtung auf das Sein und daher scließlich das Sein selbst gehört.'

⁴⁸ He cites with approval Aquinas's allusion to Aristotle's maxim that the soul is in a manner all things (SZ, §3, p. 14 / p. 34, citing DV q.1, a.1, resp.).

⁴⁹ SZ, §3, p. 14 / p. 34. See Aertsen (op. cit.), p. 137: ‘A philosophically important aspect of [Aquinas's] doctrine is the idea that “being” and “the mind” do not belong to opposite domains, but are, so to say, “convenient.”'

⁵⁰ DV q.1, a.1, resp.

⁵¹ DV q.1, a.2, resp. (‘invenitur verum … per prius autem in intellectu'); cf. ST q.16, a. 2, resp. This does not seem to have been the universal medieval view: Aertsen notes elsewhere that Philip the Chancellor, for instance, rejected Hilary of Poitiers' definition of truth on the basis of its dependence on a knowing subject (‘verum enim sine respectu ad intellectum') (Aertsen, Jan, ‘Truth as Transcendental in Aquinas,' Topoi 11 (1992), pp. 159–171 at p. 160 and p. 170 n. 6)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In any event, it is not obvious to me how Heidegger's claim that truth resides primarily with Dasein significantly differs from Aquinas's position on this point, nor indeed whether it does not suggest a subterranean theological influence, especially in light of the affirmation of the resemblance condition cited in n. 46 above.

⁵² DV q.1, a.1, resp. (‘verum … in quo formaliter ratio veri perficitur').

⁵³ Wippel, ‘Truth in Aquinas (Part One)', pp. 310–311, and p. 314. Cf. John Wippel, ‘Truth in Thomas Aquinas (Part Two),' Review of Metaphysics 43/3 (1990), pp. 543–567 at p. 543: ‘Thomas holds that truth is formally and intrinsically present in things themselves … [though] only when it is taken broadly (improprie), not when it is taken strictly (proprie).'

⁵⁴ DV q.1, a.1, ad 6: ‘verum et ens … [non] per essentiam differunt.' Cf. DV q.1, a.1, ad 7 (‘patet quod omne verum est aliquo').

⁵⁵ Pieper, Josef, ‘Heideggers Wahrheitsbegriff,' in Wald, Berthold, ed., Schriften zum Philosophiebegriff (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1995), p. 189Google Scholar: ‘[D]ie Heideggersche These vom Wahrsein als Entdeckendsein formell und ausdrücklich eine mittelalterliche These ist' (Pieper's italics). Pieper also argues (p. 190) that it is with Scotus' increased emphasis on the subject's role in the cognitive process that the veritas rerum loses its form-bestowing function. In his broad-brush dismissal of “scholasticism”, it is clear that Heidegger's failure to make any distinction between Thomistic and Scotist strands in medieval thought gravely undermines the plausibility of his critique (on this point, see also John P. Doyle, Collected Studies on Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617) (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2010), pp. 99–105). For an excellent analysis of Scotist influences on Heidegger's account of truth, see McGrath, Sean, ‘Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language,' Review of Metaphysics 57/2 (2003), pp. 339–358Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ DV q.1, a.1, resp. (Hilary: ‘verum est … manifestativum esse'; Augustine: ‘veritas est qua ostenditur id quod est.').

⁵⁷ DV q.1, a.4, sed contra 5: ‘refertur ad Deum … veritas ut ad causam exemplarem.'

⁵⁸ My deepest thanks to Catherine Pickstock for comments on and encouragement with earlier drafts of this essay.