“object” of knowledge. Then again, as this place of truth, it claims special attention only because the truth and the possession of the truth attract exceptional interest. We seek the truth, we speak of the “will to truth,” we believe we possess the truth, we prize the “value” of the truth. The truth and its possession, or non-possession, are what make us uneasy, happy, or disappointed, and only for that reason does the assertion, as the place of truth, receive basically a special attention, and furthermore, only for that reason is there basically something like “logic.” I intentionally use the word “basically,” since matters have been quite different for a long time now, and the situation has been precisely the opposite. For a long time there has been logic as a discipline of scholastic philosophy, and in fact precisely since the beginning of Plato’s school, but indeed only since then. Because logic exists as the examination of λόγος, there is also the “problem” of “truth,” truth taken as the distinctive property of λόγος. The “problem of truth” is therefore a problem of “logic” or, as we say in more modern times, theory of knowledge. Truth is that “value” by which knowledge first counts as knowledge. And the basic form of knowledge is the judgment, the proposition, the assertion, the λόγος. Theory of knowledge is therefore always “logic” in the just-mentioned essential sense.
Even though it might sound exaggerated to say that the problem of truth exists as a “problem” because there is “logic” and because this discipline is from time to time taken up once again and presented under a new veneer, nevertheless it remains undebatable that since the time of Plato and Aristotle the question of truth has been a question of logic. This implies that the search for what truth is moves along the paths and in the perspectives which were firmly laid down by the approach and the range of tasks of logic and its presuppositions. To mention only more modern thinkers, this fact can easily be substantiated on the basis of the works of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Though it is certain that for these philosophers and in general for the entire tradition of Western philosophy, the question of truth is a meditation on thinking and λόγος, and hence is a question of “logic,” yet it would be completely superficial and falsifying to claim that these thinkers have raised the question of truth, and consequently