history of the essence of truth is no proof of its unreality but only evidence of our lack of reflective power. If we now distinguish, in our representations, between a historiographical consideration and a historical reflection, nothing is gained as long as we do not carry out that distinction and put it to the test in a real historical reflection. Yet we had to provide this first reference to the distinction, at least in order to obviate a misinterpretation of what follows as a mere report about doctrines long bygone.
§15. The Aristotelian foundation of the correctness of an assertion as the essence of truth.
Because our discussion of Greek philosophy is not a historiographical addendum but belongs to the very course of our questioning, this course must be constantly surveyed and dominated. Let us therefore briefly repeat the task. Through a first reflection, the traditional conception of truth as correctness became questionable. Something worthy of questioning showed itself: that multiple-unitary openness of beings, on the basis of which a conformity to something in representation, and consequently correctness, first become possible. If we conceive and understand this openness as the ground of the possibility of correctness, we touch upon truth in its original and proper essence. But the return to this openness leads to the original essence of truth only if it can be shown in advance with good foundation that correctness already in some way contains, even if not originally, the essence of truth. What is the case here? Is the interpretation of truth as the correctness of a representation or assertion a founded one, and how so? In order to gain some clarity, we will ask this question in view of the primordial positing of the definition of truth in Aristotle. The return to the Aristotelian doctrine is not to be a mere historiographical consideration but a historical reflection.
The first step would be to recount Aristotle’s doctrine of the essence of the true and the false, and then discuss the appurtenance of truth and falsity to the assertion (λόγος) and the structure of the assertion itself. But because the contemporary theory of truth and of the assertion is not essentially distinct from Aristotle’s