Incompleteness of Heidegger's Interpretation of Platonic Truth: A Critical Review of Plato's Doctrine of Truth

In his treatise of Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, by referring to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, Heidegger intends to demonstrate that the meaning of truth in Platonic philosophy underwent some transformation comparing to how pre-Socratic Greeks defined it. Here, truth as unhiddenness is reduced to truth as “true” and “correspondence”. The purpose of the present paper is to explain that Heidegger’s interpretation of Platonic truth does not cover all of Plato’s ideas regarding the meaning of truth. Accordingly, by referring to some of Plato’s ideas regarding, for example, “good”, “beauty”, “existence”, and “truth”, the writers have tried to disclose some of the contradictory points of Heidegger’s interpretation of the meaning of truth in Plato’s philosophy. They have also tried to demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Plato is reductionist in nature, and that downgrading the meaning of truth merely to the level of “true” and “correspondence”, more than being based on Plato’s documented ideas, originates in Heidegger’s will to call the whole history of Western philosophy as Western metaphysics.