Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Alethic
/əˈliːθɪk/adjective
Concerning necessity and possibility, as opposed to knowledge or obligation.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
not, without
λήθη
lḗthē
forgetting, concealment
Literally: “un-concealed”
The story of the word
ἀλήθεια, truth, is a negative word: not hidden, not forgotten. The river Lethe in the underworld wipes what the dead knew, and truth in Greek is what escapes that erasure. Heidegger built a great deal on reading ἀλήθεια as unconcealment, which classicists treat with some caution. The adjective in English is narrow and modern, from von Wright's 1951 sorting of modal logics into the alethic, the deontic and the epistemic.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → philosophical coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
Lethelethargylethargic
In a sentence
Alethic necessity is about what could not have been otherwise, not about what we are able to prove.
The distinction between alethic and epistemic possibility does real work in the argument.