American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 83, Issue 4, Fall 2009

Truth in Metaphysics
Duns Scotus and the Early Heidegger

This essay juxtaposes Duns Scotus’s treatment of the nature of truth with the doctrine concerning truth developed by Heidegger in Being and Time. Both Scotus and Heidegger are concerned inter alia with the same phenomenon: truth as our apprehension of entities. But Scotus speaks of the truth that is in entities, whereas for Heidegger there is no truth in things, but only in their unveiledness to Dasein. Scotus offers us a model in which there are different senses in which we can speak of truth, and in which these complement one another. Scotus could accommodate Heidegger’s crucial insights about the encounter between Dasein and the world. But Heidegger could not accept much of Scotus’s account without giving up some fundamental points of his argument.