Traditionally, truth has been thought of as a correspondence between word and thing, but not every philosopher who speaks of truth is always talking about such a correspondence. Martin Heidegger, for one, does not. He brought together a non-traditional group of unlikely likeminded folks who spoke of truth as a disclosure, or as openness, or as unconcealedness. Together, they formed the clique Aletheia, which comes from the Greek word for "truth."

With Heidegger were Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, whose way of reading texts opened them to what they excluded; Hans-Georg Gadamer, who argued that to read a text was to recreate it and perform it within a tradition that opens it to new possibilities; and Paul Ricoeur, who brought opposing texts into dialogue with each other in order to reveal what each had to say from its own standpoint.