Body Of Truth Research Articles

Aristotle’s Empiricism

<i>Aristotle’s Empiricism</i>

The Abridgement Paradox

When axiomatizing a body of truths, one first concentrates on obtaining a set of axioms that entail all and only those truths. The theorist expects that this complete system will have some needlessly strong axioms that can later be weakened or even deleted. What happens if the theorist includes in his system recognition of this superfluity? Contradiction! Even admitting the possibility of superfluity dashes all hope of consistency. Any suspicion of superfluous information must be voiced from outside the system.

Bodies of truth: The terrible beauty of queer performance

This piece examines five recent performances from Greece in an attempt to map both their interventions and contributions to the development of Greek queer aesthetics. It provides a chart of this relatively unknown performative landscape and explains how the queering process works in constructing queer ‘freaks’, cultural mourning and a new iconography of Greekness.

Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post‐apartheid South Africa. Rita Kesselring. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 272 pp.

Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post‐apartheid South Africa. Rita Kesselring. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 272 pp.

Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Rita Kesselring

Reviewed by: Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Rita Kesselring Nicholas Rush Smith Rita Kesselring, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. By now, much has been written about the politics of apartheid victimhood and particularly South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—a multi-year series of public hearings into political crimes committed under apartheid. Scholars have written on such varied topics as the public performances of the TRC (Cole 2010) and the bureaucratic work going on behind the scenes (Buur 2002). Scholars have praised the TRC for allowing reconciliation without requiring punishment (Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts 1997) and, conversely, criticized it for forestalling justice by granting amnesty in exchange for confession (Sitze 2013). Scholars have studied the multiple forms of individual confession and storytelling performed during hearings (Posel 2008), while others have decried the focus on individuals as detracting from the collective nature of apartheid's injustices (Mamdani 2002). With such varied work having been done on the country's reckoning with apartheid's crimes through the TRC, what more is there to say? Quite a bit if one reads Rita Kesselring's excellent updating on the politics of apartheid victimhood, Bodies of Truth. One key difference between Kesselring's book and previous work on apartheid victimhood is the empirical focus. Where other work predominantly looks at the institution of the TRC, Kesselring looks at a social movement of apartheid victims that first emerged in response to the TRC process. The Khulumani Support Group, a grassroots (though increasingly professionalized) victim advocacy group, forms the main basis for this study. This lens allows Kesselring to open a novel space through which to understand the relationship between apartheid and victimization. [End Page 841] Where the TRC promoted a view of apartheid victimhood predicated on direct injury by the regime or one of the country's liberation movements, Kesselring shows, via engagement with Khulumani, how the focus on direct injury excludes other forms of victimhood, like the structural violence that apartheid's inequality produced for most of the country's population. The violence of this lingering inequality, Kesselring shows, can also have injurious effects on the body, as economic deprivation can force people into forms of labor that strain the limbs and harm the soul. Apartheid's injuries, therefore, are not only individual; they are also social. The question of the body and victimhood are not only questions for how to understand the after effects of apartheid, though. They shed general light on the globally increasing turn to law by victims of state violence seeking redress for past injuries. Where some scholars writing of this trend have argued that such lawfare may entrench victimization as one's primary subject position, Kesselring argues the opposite. For her, pursuing legal remedies does not produce subjection to a legal discourse. Rather, "it is the consequence of people's attempt to emancipate themselves from a discourse—under conditions in which the law is a more promising avenue than politics" (2). Nonetheless, legal remedies are only partial solutions to victimhood as "embodied experiences of harm are not (and cannot be) completely absorbed by legal discourse" (2). The mismatch between legal processes and the experience of bodily injury can create challenges for redressing the effects of collective injuries legally. However, it also offers opportunities for victims, like Khulumani members, to experiment with new forms of sociality and political claim making by lodging legal cases, launching protests, and relying on one another for emotional support. To make these arguments, Kesselring's first three empirical chapters look at the jurisprudence in South African and American courts that have taken up victimization since the end of apartheid and how legal procedure might work against the formation of collective, political notions of victimhood. The first of these chapters (Chapter 1) lays out the background of the Khulumani Support Group. Although it started as a small group of apartheid victims, today it claims roughly 104,000 members. The Khulumani membership, it should be noted, dwarfs the 21,000 people who applied for reparations from the TRC victims fund. Part of the difference...

Book Review: Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Book Review: Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Body of Truth. HarrietBrown. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2015. 304 pp. $32.50 cloth.

Body of Truth. HarrietBrown. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2015. 304 pp. $32.50 cloth.

Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It by Harriet Brown

<i>Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do about It</i> by Harriet Brown

The Counter Tradition of Post-Modern Corporatism

The author presents a grim impasse that cannot be resolved without the epic misadventures currently underway. Its socially constructed and institutionalized roots disclose extraordinary accords between corporate functionality and the criminal influence of an exceptional minority of stakeholders referred to as ‘one percent elitists’. As outlined in a previous paper, this trans-national/trans-generational oligarchy scientifically applies subversive methods that displace staple moral and ethical values of the several Higher Cultures that preceded its financial, economic and political hegemony, most especially post WWI. Hence, traditional societies decline as corporate cultures advance the devolution of a global zeitgeist bearing monetized mind-sets that trump social capital and the real values of genuine economic and cultural exchange. Rene Guenon called the application of this processing “a Counter-Tradition that exists only as a parasite on the body of truth as political correctness.” This paper reviews and integrates opinions and observations of moralists, educators, lawyers, social scientists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, industrialists, philosophers, wizened scholars, theologians, military officers, journalists and politicians who have wedded Kant’s sensus communis to an amalgam of scientific methods and fertile experience along with a sound grasp of history and knowledge of the human psyche. The author attempts to (a) Describe the genuine value of human trust extending from micro to macro social constructions. (b) Explain how a ‘trust deficit’ unambiguously signifies a dishonourable system of governance that(c) adversely affects the entire range of social relations and beneficial activities from family to state via (d) the founding and maintenance of malefic institutions robed in impunity and protected by pathologic loyalty frameworks. The obvious conclusion and solution is to restrain the appetites and sway of the few in favour of the many, which is certainly not a novel hitch in so ancient a struggle. The question is: How do we glean and reapply what is useful of corporate and social constructionist ideals for the greater benefit of mankind? Some remedies are on offer using traditional Amish protocols, as well as Islamic and Chinese metaphysics and social models.

We Are All Ballooning: Multimedia Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Measure Up’ and ‘Swap It, Don’t Stop It’ Social Marketing Campaigns

We Are All Ballooning: Multimedia Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Measure Up’ and ‘Swap It, Don’t Stop It’ Social Marketing Campaigns

A Body of Truth / A Truth of the Body

A Body of Truth / A Truth of the Body

Bodies of truth: Eric Voegelin’s ontology of participation and the potentialities of embodied being

This article critically engages with the work of Eric Voegelin, a thinker who, for the most part, has remained neglected. Against this neglect the claim is advanced that Voegelin’s thought should be taken heed of, not least from thinkers who register themselves in the radical tradition of political theory. At the same time, however, it is argued that any positive appropriation of Voegelin from a radical perspective has to put under critical scrutiny basic assumptions informing his thought, and above all his conception of the body. In particular, the argument put forward is that Voegelin’s impoverished conceptualization of the body constitutes a real problem for his thought, and specifically one that underscores his dismissive attitude toward political radicalism. Subsequently, through a presentation of recent theoretical discussions of the body, a more positive conception of embodied being is sought for, which can lay open the radical dynamic of Voegelin’s participatory ontology.

Badiou's Biopolitics: The Human Animal and the Body of Truth

The paper addresses Alain Badiou's attempts to overcome the biopolitical tendency in contemporary Western societies by redefining politics as a ‘truth procedure’, transcending the mere existence of human beings and exposing them to the dimension of eternal truths. I argue that Badiou's account of the formation of the ‘body of truth’ fails to break with the biopolitical logic and instead corresponds to Agamben's definition of biopolitics in terms of the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order of ‘good life’. While Badiou's claims to overcome biopolitics are problematic, his politics of truth nonetheless exemplifies a genuine alternative to the ‘democratic-materialist’ biopolitics that he criticizes. Through a reading of Badiou's account of the generation of truths I demonstrate that the content of truths is neither arbitrary nor transcendent in relation to the bodies of human beings but rather affirms their ontological equality against every form of hierarchy or exclusion. Badiou's ‘body of truth’ is thus nothing other than the living bodies themselves, plus the truth of their equality. Insofar as in this figure ‘good life’ and ‘mere life’ become indistinct, Badiou's politics of truth accords with Agamben's idea of affirmative biopolitics of a life inseparable from its form.

The Morality of Wonder: A Positive Interpretation of Socratic Ignorance

This essay argues that there are several positive aspects of Socratic ignorance which have received insufficient scholarly attention: that Socrates’ claim not to have knowledge of the ‘highest things’ raises the possibility that there is a body of truth to be discovered along these lines; that this possibility invigorates Socrates with a sense of wonder; and that several specific moral requirements can be generated from wonder and the knowledge of one’s ignorance.

Quine, Analyticity and Philosophy of Mathematics

Quine correctly argues that Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions rests on a distinction between analytic and synthetic, which Quine rejects. I argue that Quine needs something like Carnap's distinction to enable him to explain the obviousness of elementary mathematics, while at the same time continuing to maintain as he does that the ultimate ground for holding mathematics to be a body of truths lies in the contribution that mathematics makes to our overall scientific theory of the world. Quine's arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction, even if fully accepted, still leave room for a notion of pragmatic analyticity sufficient for the indicated purpose.

Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity

Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity

Body of truth: D.H. Lawrence: the nomadic years, 1919-1930

In November 1919 D. H. Lawrence arrived in Venice, thirty-four years old, a big name with a banned book behind him, scraping by on very little but with a zest for life undiminished by shaky health. He had had a bleak war-hounded out of Cornwall, humiliated in army medicals-and was now overjoyed to be free and on the move, a twentieth-century English exile who would remain passionately English to the end of his days. Philip Callow's account of Lawrence's last years and his almost relentless travels between New Mexico, Europe, and England brings the great writer to life in intimate detail. As Lawrence's disgust with the Western world grew more intense, his rage ebbed and flowed erratically, but between the rages he knew rapture. He relished his workingman's aptitude, but what sustained him was his writing. Without it, he once said, I would have been dead long ago. His anger finally found an outlet that earned him money: he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover and broke the taboo against explicit sex in literature. In poetry, novellas, travel writing, and the painting of visceral canvases, Lawrence continued to respond to the demands of his art. And, to the end, he clung to his wife, the fundamentally married man he had always been. In Body of Truth, Philip Callow gives us a poignant and revealing story of the artist at life's end.

Reconstruction of Educational Research

If there are some subjects on which the results obtained have finally received the unanimous assent of all who have attended to the proof, and others which .. .have never succeeded in establishing any considerable body of truths, so as to be beyond denial or doubt; it is by generalizing the methods successfully followed in the former enquiries, and adapting them to the latter, that we may hope to remove this blot on the face of science.

International scientific policy

Just as every country has an economic policy meaning, in very general terms, that every state intervenes to influence production, distribution and consumption so nearly every industrialised nation now has its scientific policy, in which the government takes action to organise and foster research, discovery, invention and innovation. There is, however, no scientific policy, in this sense, at the international level. Neither on a regional nor on a world scale does there exist any supranational authority responsible for working out a common policy in this field. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether such a central institution will ever be desirable or feasible: scientific enterprises and organisations, working on an international scale, are so varied that they could scarcely be managed by a common authority. There would also be immense political obstacles to any such scheme in the present state of international relations. It is said that in no field is international cooperation more feasible than in science and there is some truth in this but willingness to participate in cooperative ventures internationally has its limits even in the sphere of science. The NATO scheme for an International Institute of Technology,1 for example, has come to nothing because the members of NATO were reluctant to mortgage their scientific assets and above all their human assets to such a large-scale undertaking. As a body of truths and procedures or rules, science is universal in its validity and is unaffected by nationality or any other claim to loyalty; but as a resource for national security or aggrandisement, as an instrument of economic and social welfare and collective prestige, science is subject to claims which are at present irresistible. Though there is no such thing as an international scientific policy, there is at least a system of international relations in the scientific sphere. This system is not immune to political stresses and it is greatly affected by the

All-or-None Elements and Mathematical Models for Sociologists

preserve of a few strategists who make their own ground rules, it behooves all of us to take a more active part in theory-production. The persistent lack of a widely accepted set of tested propositions about human group behavior-an interdependent, internally consistent, and open-ended body of truth about relationships that goes by the name of systematic theory-is a hindrance to more rapid sciencebuilding in sociology. It means, for instance, that we are forced to direct most of our investigations toward individual theories, limited hypotheses, and similar bits and pieces of the grand design. This does not, or should not, relieve any of us of responsibilities for improving as best we can the conceptual and theoretical superstructure of our discipline. To fulfill its dynamic and seminal purpose, systematic theory must be built by many for mass consumption, not by the few for limited circulation. Therefore, I suggest that the gap created by the abolition of theory as a separate field might profitably be filled by a session which would work on the larger problem of reconciliation of theories from all fields of our investigation. Unless such a working synthesis can be put into concrete form soon, the centrifugal forces now at work in sociology may scatter it all over the academic countryside before the end of the century.