The guiding question of the 1938/39 seminar on the Second Inactual Consideration was: "How does man's representative and perceptive relation to being, under the figure(Gestalt) of the subject-object relation, acquire its primacy" in history? The answer: because theanimal rationale becomes the sole subiectum, and the subiectum itself is limited to what is and calls itself " ego ". This is a change(Wandel) in our "historial being-there", in the history "that we are". Since this change originates in a change in the essence of truth, we have begun a closer examination of the Heideggerian idea of the history of truth. The history of truth is a "history of the essence of truth", of "changes in the essence of truth": it is neither a simple "history of the concept of truth" nor a "history of holding for truth". The change in the representative relationship of "representative man" to being, and its transformation into a subject-object relationship, originates in the change of/in the essence of truth, which constitutes the passage from rectitudo to certitudo. This passage from "rectitude in the sense of being directed and regulated by something", where truth is defined in medieval terms as an " adaequatio intellectus ad rem", to the certitude of the subject defined by the synthesis of subjectivity and egoism, Subiectität andIchheit, takes place in Descartes and in Kant, Descartes' interpreter. In this respect, we studied the 1941 texts Metaphysics as the History of Being and Projects for the History of Being as Metaphysics, in which Heidegger analyzes the "prejacency" (Vorliegenheit) of the I and the structure of (Cartesian) subjective representation, the cogitatio, insofar as it is extended to the sphere of the non-cognitive. A comparison was made between two models of psychic immanence (as distinguished from physical inherence), both of which account for the inference captured by Hintikkian KK-thesis (Kap É KaKap, if a knows that p, a knows that a knows that p): the Heideggerian model of the constant pre-jacence-immanence of the Cartesianego cogito cogitatum at the heart of repraesentatio(Vor-stellung) and the Brentanian model of the self-inclusion of the psychic act ("every psychic act contains itself as a second object"). The thesis that the "subjectivity"(Subjektivität) of modern metaphysics is a "mode of subjectivity"(Subjectität) is a thesis about the history of being that Heidegger advances through a continuous "historicization" of the notion of Vor-stellung. We have analyzed in detail the Heideggerian "grand narrative" of subjectivation in Metaphysics as the History of Being and its two initial foundations: the Platonicἰδέα becomes theidea and the latter the representation(Vorstellung). The Aristotelianἐνέργεια becomesactualitas and this one actual reality(Wirkilchkeit). We concluded by pointing out that the history of truth was part of the history of Being/Estre and by isolating three points for consideration:
- the distinction between rectitude and certainty, and the conception of truth as adaequatio ;
- the role attributed to Descartes;
- the place given to the Middle Ages in Heidegger's account(s) of the birth of the modern subject.
The second hour, devoted to the conditions of the transition from rectitude to certainty, examined the three medieval meanings of " veritas ":
- the truth of the thing (veritas rei), i.e. "the true is "what is" (id quod est);
- anselmian" truth-rectitude, i.e. "truth is rectitude perceptible to the mind alone" (rectitudo sola mente perceptibilis);
- truth-correspondence, i.e. truth is the "adequacy of thing and thought" (adaequatio rei et intellectus).
