Abstract

Human beings wonder about the reality that surrounds them and strive to capture the answer to the question "what is this all about?" The innate assumption that there is an answer to this question gives rise to the idea of "truth." Human beings have only two main resources---of "truth"---they can turn to; the first is an objective resource, which, so to speak, lies "outside" of us, and the second is ourselves. The outcome of the inquiries according to these two resources can be summarized as the modern and the postmodern representations of truth. I strongly believe that prior to any representation of reality, there is the innate conviction---consciously realized and expressed, or not---that there is or there must be an answer to the question "what is this all about?" This is the core of the main idea of the dissertation, i.e., "truth" is an assumption par excellence. I believe that thinking, the most peculiar human capacity, is the origin of "truth as assumption." I argue that the "ownerless" capability of thinking that unfolds "by-itself" necessarily presupposes the understanding of reality as its object and the self as that which is to conceptualize this reality. The self whose existence is thus granted invents its own reality and its own place in this reality. In other words, this so-called self is born out of the invented ownership of the capacity of thinking to capture its object, namely, the answer to the question "what is this all about?" I will argue that there is no outside-"truth as assumption," that there cannot be an outside-"truth as assumption" because "truth as assumption" is the reason of the very existence of the human self