Pancreatic cancer – a patient and his doctor balance hope and truth [Book Review]

This book comprises 11 chapters, alternating between two authors (a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer and an oncologist)...

Lying in all honesty : capturing truth in women’s confessional memoir

This paper explores the slippery nature of illness and diagnosis in Lauren Slater’s memoir, Lying: a Metaphorical Memoir (2000). Speaking from the shadowy intersection of childhood and adolescence, Slater’s narrator, Lauren, uses the metaphor of epilepsy to describe her own predilection for exaggeration. In exploiting the fallibility of the first-person narrator, Slater insists on the legitimacy of metaphor in accounts of childhood illness that are more concerned with narrative truth than historical accuracy. The result of this playfulness and general misrule is that Slater writes herself into a double bind: on one side, she is the child narrator who inadvertently misrepresents events and misdirects readers, and on the other side, she is the untrustworthy author who employs metaphor as a licence to lie.

Proteins, drug targets and the mechanisms they control : the simple truth about complex networks

Realizing the promise of molecularly targeted inhibitors for cancer therapy will require a new level of knowledge about how a drug target is wired into the control circuitry of a complex cellular network. Here we review general homeostatic principles of cellular networks that enable the cell to be resilient in the face of molecular perturbations, while at the same time being sensitive to subtle input signals. Insights into such mechanisms may facilitate the development of combination therapies that take advantage of the cellular control circuitry, with the aim of achieving higher efficacy at a lower drug dosage and with a reduced probability of drug-resistance development.

Milbank’s milieu : theorisations of truth, faith and reason

This article seeks to clarify and theorise three fundamental themes in the work of John Milbank: truth, faith and reason. In his work, Milbank often uses these terms in ambiguous ways, so the terminology requires clarity to facilitate further productive discussion. It is found that truth refers to the revelation of the divine relations in the Trinity, and these correspond with human relations when this revelation is apprehended by faith through participation. Faith means trust or persuasion, such that when the divine is graciously revealed, the mind is transformed and persuaded to participate in the divine relations. This faith is reconciled with reason, or logos, the divine word which is Christ and is the ultimate revelation of the Trinity through the Incarnation, which produces a reason that leads to peace based in faith.

On the symbiosis of law and truth in Christian theology: Reconciling universal and particular through the Pauline law of love

This article argues that the secular liberal and positivist foundations of the modern Western legal system render it violent. In particular, the liberal exclusion of faith and subjectivity in favour of abstract and universal reason in conjunction with its privileging of individual autonomy at the expense of the community leads to alienation of the individual from the community. Similarly, the positivist exclusion of faith and theology from law, with its enforced conformity to the posited law, also results in this violence of alienation. In response, this article proposes a new foundation for law, a natural law based in the truth of Trinitarian theology articulated by John Milbank. In the Trinity, the members exist as a perfect unity in diversity, providing a model for the reconciliation of the legal individual and community: the law of love. Through the law of love as the basic norm, individuals love their neighbours as themselves, reconciling the particular and the universal, and providing a community of peace rather than violence.

A review of: "Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. By Michel Foucault. Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Translated by Stephen W. Sawyer"

Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice is a collection of seven lectures delivered by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1981. Compiled from audiovisual recordings and Foucault’s original manuscripts, these lectures explore the notion of avowal and its place within criminal justice processes. Accompanied by three contemporaneous interviews given by Foucault (only one of which has previously been available in English), and a preface and concluding essay by the editors contextualizing these lectures in Foucault’s oeuvre, this volume contributes much to Foucaultian scholarship, particularly when considered alongside the recently published volumes of Foucault’s lecture courses at the Collège de France. However, while the book promises to offer some insights of relevance to criminology, it is important to remember that this is not its key purpose, and criminologists should read it with this caveat in mind...

The plain truth: Australia, tobacco control, and Southeast Asia

As of December 2012, Australia will be the first country in the world where tobacco products will be sold in olive plain packaging without branding. There has been much discussion as to whether this pioneering initiative will spark an ‘Olive Revolution’ around the world — with other countries adopting the plain packaging of tobacco products. Australia’s neighbours in Southeast Asia would particularly benefit from tobacco control measures such as the plain packaging.

Speaking the bitter truth: The role of the creative imagination in the process of healing

This chapter is concerned with the complexity and difficulty of truth telling as it is played out in two graphic novels: Stitches: A Memoir (Small 2009) and Why We Broke Up (Handler & Kalman, 2011). These texts establish a link between creative imagination and pain as the central protagonists come to see the therapeutic value of literature and film in helping them understand the complex emotional worlds they inhabit and the bitter truths about love and relationships. The discussion examines how these texts privilege a particular kind of independent subjectivity through aesthetic creation and appropriation. It also considers how speaking and silence are co-present elements in gender relations and each has its part to play in the double process of suffering and healing.

Truth, Proof and Gödelian Arguments : A Defence of Tarskian Truth in Mathematics

One of the most fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relation between truth and formal proof. The position according to which the two concepts are the same is called deflationism, and the opposing viewpoint substantialism. In an important result of mathematical logic, Kurt Gödel proved in his first incompleteness theorem that all consistent formal systems containing arithmetic include sentences that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. However, such undecidable Gödel sentences can be established to be true once we expand the formal system with Alfred Tarski s semantical theory of truth, as shown by Stewart Shapiro and Jeffrey Ketland in their semantical arguments for the substantiality of truth. According to them, in Gödel sentences we have an explicit case of true but unprovable sentences, and hence deflationism is refuted. Against that, Neil Tennant has shown that instead of Tarskian truth we can expand the formal system with a soundness principle, according to which all provable sentences are assertable, and the assertability of Gödel sentences follows. This way, the relevant question is not whether we can establish the truth of Gödel sentences, but whether Tarskian truth is a more plausible expansion than a soundness principle. In this work I will argue that this problem is best approached once we think of mathematics as the full human phenomenon, and not just consisting of formal systems. When pre-formal mathematical thinking is included in our account, we see that Tarskian truth is in fact not an expansion at all. I claim that what proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal thinking, and the Tarskian account of semantical truth mirrors this relation accurately. However, the introduction of pre-formal mathematics is vulnerable to the deflationist counterargument that while existing in practice, pre-formal thinking could still be philosophically superfluous if it does not refer to anything objective. Against this, I argue that all truly deflationist philosophical theories lead to arbitrariness of mathematics. In all other philosophical accounts of mathematics there is room for a reference of the pre-formal mathematics, and the expansion of Tarkian truth can be made naturally. Hence, if we reject the arbitrariness of mathematics, I argue in this work, we must accept the substantiality of truth. Related subjects such as neo-Fregeanism will also be covered, and shown not to change the need for Tarskian truth. The only remaining route for the deflationist is to change the underlying logic so that our formal languages can include their own truth predicates, which Tarski showed to be impossible for classical first-order languages. With such logics we would have no need to expand the formal systems, and the above argument would fail. From the alternative approaches, in this work I focus mostly on the Independence Friendly (IF) logic of Jaakko Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu. Hintikka has claimed that an IF language can include its own adequate truth predicate. I argue that while this is indeed the case, we cannot recognize the truth predicate as such within the same IF language, and the need for Tarskian truth remains. In addition to IF logic, also second-order logic and Saul Kripke s approach using Kleenean logic will be shown to fail in a similar fashion.

Popper or Kuhn: Truth and the progress of science

The questions of whether science pursues truth as correspondence to reality and whether science in fact progresses towards attaining a truthful understanding of physical reality are fundamental and contested in the philosophy of science. On one side of the debate stands Popper, who argues that science is objective, necessarily assumes a correspondence theory of truth, and inevitably progresses toward truth as physical theories develop, gaining a more truthful understanding of reality through progressively more sophisticated empirical analysis. Conversely Kuhn, influenced by postmodern philosophy, argues that ultimate truth cannot be attained since no objective metaphysical reality exists and it cannot be known, and consequently the notion of scientific objectivity and "progress" is a myth, marred by philosophical and ideological value judgments. Ultimately, Kuhn reduces so-called scientific progress through the adoption of successive paradigms to leaps of "faith". This paper seeks a reconciliation of the two extremes, arguing that Popper is correct in the sense that science assumes a correspondence theory of truth and may progress toward truth as physical theories develop, while simultaneously acknowledging with Kuhn that science is not purely objective and free of value judgments. The notion of faith is also critical, for it was the acknowledgement of God's existence as the creator and instituter of observable natural laws which allowed the development of science and the scientific method in the first place. Therefore, accepting and synthesising the contentions that science is to some extent founded on faith, assumes and progresses toward truth, and is subject to value judgments is necessary for the progress of science.

The Truth About Soviet Whaling: A Memoir

In November 1993, Professor Alexei Yablokov, who at the time was the Science Advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, stood on a podium in Galveston, Tex., and delivered a speech to the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s biennial conference, the premier international event in the field of marine mammal science. Addressing the 1,500 scientists present, he made what amounted to a national confession: that, beginning in 1948, the U.S.S.R. had begun a huge campaign of illegal whaling. Despite being a signatory to the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (signed in Washington, D.C., just 2 years before in 1946), the Soviets set out to pillage the world’s ocean

The Truth About Soviet Whaling

I have always condemned (and to do anything more was not within our power or abilities) the illegal and sometimes destructive whaling by the Soviet Union. This opinion was expressed in numerous documents, including reports and records of presentations at scientific and other meetings; these documents are the witnesses to this condemnation. However, none of these documents ever saw the light of day: all of them were marked with the sinister stamp “secret.” When necessary in this memoir, my opinion of the whaling will be supported by data drawn from these docume