“We would like to thank the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for allowing us to reproduce on the cover of this book one of the sketches that John Singer Sargent created as he was working on the murals that adorn the MFA’s rotunda. The title of that work is ‘The Unveiling of Truth’ and it can be seen, in its completed execution, above the entrance to the Museum’s Library, flanked by the figures of Philosophy and Science. John Singer Sargent breaks new ground by deciding to represent ‘Truth’ not as a static figure (a half-naked woman, for example), as was the artistic tradition of the past, but rather as a process (‘the unveiling’). By capturing Truth in or as her unveiling—this, after all, is neither the unveiled Truth nor the Truth to be unveiled, but the precise moment of unveiling—Sargent leaves his work suspended, as it were, in undecidability. For, as we look in his sketch, we do not quite know whether the kneeling youth unveils the mysterious figure in the background (and thus the work confirms its title) or his actions have the opposite effect: that of veiling and covering. It is this ambiguity that resonates so deeply with what Heidegger found decisive in the Greek understanding of truth as aletheia.”

—Drew Hyland, Acknowledgements to Heidegger and the Greeks