"I'm surprised no one has done the phenomenology of the invisibility cloak"

:). Of course someone has, his name was Heidegger.

I hope though that at the very least my issues are not with "truth" per se, but with truth as defined as "uncoveredness".
 

Well, Aletheia is the originary truth. It whooshes up from the logos (or was it the apeiron? something suitably pre-Socratic)), unlike like those lesser, derived forms, like propositional truth, which may be useful in the right context.
 

The question is whether "Aletheia" is properly translated by Heidegger when he makes his sweeping generalization. I contend that it is not. To reduce "Aletheia" to the concept of uncoveredness is to already have entered it into the logos, so to speak, in a very specific way. Greeks at the time, long before Aristotle, understood what Aletheia was, with heavy influence of what "lethe" was.

So yes, if you want to say Aletheia was the originary "truth" let's be crazy and go ahead and affirm that. But Greek Aletheia simply was not Heidegger's "Aletheia". Heidegger translated the term within the Idealist tradition. Once his translation is in place, set to begin his "history of the truth" a lot of the work is already done.
 

> The question is whether "Aletheia" is properly translated

In 1964 Heidegger says: "truth does not mean unconcealment".

Someone had pointed out that in the earliest Greek texts, ἀλήθεια is used to mean sameness, and not unveiling.

I think it's proper for Heidegger to point out that appropriation, as an entity's movement into appearance, can be glimpsed by unpacking a-letheia as un-hidden.

The word I was looking for in my first comment was φύσις. Heraclitus said physis loves to hide.
 

Yes. For Heidegger Aletheia does not mean "truth" per se, but is part of his construction of the "history of truth". The problem is, whether you think it proper or not, his translation is utterly driven by an optical metaphor, and greatly reduces the meaning of the word as it likely was understood by the Greeks he so loved to turn to. Now, of course when one is free to make up the history of an idea, falsify it in a sense, sure, one can do all kinds of things with such a tactic. Once he has properly anchored his optical metaphor in a (mis)translation of the word, the theory gains its historical legs.

It really isn't germane whether Heidegger considers Aletheia as truth or not, what matters to my question is the role of his translation of the term, the way that it is made to serve a function in the opticalization of Being, as any good Idealist would require. Lethe does not fundamentally mean "hidden" but something much more signficant, a cross-section of "obliterated, dispersed, forgotten, lost" which important affinites to the notion of "not caring, without care". When one makes an optical shorthand for this constellation of ideas, one has done something.

I understand though that for a Heideggerian this isn't really an important question. Heidegger's translation stands as justified by what he does with it. My point really is for those who are more interested in the roots of Heidegger's argument, and the way that he achieves a certain slant to Being.

The best.