Final Truth Research Articles

Sjögren's syndrome: viewpoint on pathogenesis

Objective: To critically consider the public opinion/consensus on SS formulated by opinion leaders and textbook chapters.Rationale: Although our clinical work is based on evidence-based medicine, it is obvious that we do not have evidence-based solutions tothe etiology and pathogenesis of autoimmune rheumatic diseases. In spite of this, consensus if often taken as a truth, which may hamperthe production, funding and/or publication of new and original ideas and views.Methods: Comparison of the classic view with one of the many other possible views.Results: The consensus view states that 1) SS is initiated and/or caused by an exogenous agent, probably some type of retrovirus, and 2) afterinitiation, a straightforward sequence of events follows: a) salivary gland epithelial cells are disrupted, b) T lymphocytes migrate to and areactivated in the glands, c) B cells get the help they need and start to produce SS and RF autoantibodies, which processes lead to structuraldestruction and loss of acinar cells and, thus, to sicca symptoms (an example of the linear, step-by-step "computer" logic). The problemsinherent to this view include: 1) why women? (gender aspect), 2) why at the age of 50? (chronobiologic aspect), 3) is the normal immunesystem in SS only responding to normal (formely sequestrated) autoantigens? Is the loss of exocrine gland function really caused by"autoimmune" destruction? - or do the SS-autoantibodies and lymphocyte infiltrates only represent markers in an appropriate HLAbackground? (autoimmune aspect), 4) are the retroviral diseases really similar to SS? (exogenous vs endogenous causes), 5) is our current viewcompatible with unexpected, future findings? Is the textbook interpretation the final truth (evolutionary aspect of our view on pathogenesis).Conclusion: The tubuloalveolar exocrine glands may be seen as 1) locus minoris resistentiae for normal oral microbial flora and immuneinflammatory attacks at the normal environment-host interface. Apoptotic and/or necrotic cells are released into the intraluminal space andpass in normal glands through normal, immunologically competent lymphocyte foci and/or ectopic lymphatic tissue. Acinar celldegeneration/death may increase upon 2) aging and acinar cell renewal and well-being may be hampered by age-dependent deficiencies inthe trophic 3) neuro-endocrine support. In a proper immunogenetic setting, a) marker autoantibodies (e.g. RF, SS-A/Ro, SS-B/La), usefulin the diagnosis, are produced. However, sicca symptoms/SS develop only if muscarinic receptor or other b) pathogenetic autoantibodiesdisrupting the normal neuronal-to acinar cell communication are also produced. c) Systemic symptoms could be produced on neuroendocrine,chronobiologic and autoimmune basis. Other professionals are invited to entertain their own views on the pathogenesis of SS – make yourown one!

La ciencia y el fin de los tiempos

When science is asked to refer to the end of the world the question of its real capability for predicting the future is brought about. Here we question such capability and present the concept of a credibility horizon in scientific prediction, which makes explicit the existence of a limited scope to any statement about the future. In particular, the propositions of cosmology about the evolution of the material substrate that makes life possible, or about the end of the world, must be read as statements of bounded validity and not as final truth.

“True Down to the Last Detail”: Narrative and Memory in Marguerite Duras’s “Monsieur X.”

Marguerite Duras's (1985) [1] is a collection of six disparate texts concerning her experience of World War II. essay focuses on the second text in the volume, Monsieur dit ici Pierre Rabier [Monsieur called here Pierre Rabier]. Monsieur X. tells the of Duras's chance encounter near the end of the Occupation with a French Gestapo agent who several weeks earlier had arrested her husband, Robert Antelme, for involvement in the Resistance. It also tells of the relationship she subsequently maintained with him in order, she says, to obtain information about her husband's whereabouts. At the time of these events, Francois Mitterr and was the leader of Duras's and Antelme's Resistance group, and in Une Jeunesse francaise [A Frenchman's Youth]: Francois Mitterrand, 1934-47, Pierre Pean offers alternative versions of many of the events Duras recounts in Monsieur X. That there are differences in these two authors' stories is not surprising. But the bold and characteristically impru dent claim Duras makes in the foreword to Monsieur X., that This is a that is true down to the last detail (90, 71), does tempt her readers to take interest in counterclaims. [2] Duras's statement can of course be taken simply as artistic hyperbole intended to alert readers of her fiction that Monsieur X. is indeed a true story, however accurate in its details. But taking Duras at her word and investigating discrepancies between her version of the affair and Nan's is a worthwhile task nevertheless, for it sheds light, as I will show, on the very sticky process of turning memories into narrative. While some of the differences between Duras's and Pean's accounts can be attributed simply to divergent interpretations of events by the various actors involved, others are more difficult to explain. Certain details in Une Jeunesse that contradict or at least differ from those in are presumably verifiable facts (taken from court transcripts or corroborated by several witnesses, for example) and thus seem to belie Duras's prefatory assertion. If we admit some aspects of Pean's account to be more accurate than Duras's, to what then can we attribute the inaccuracies in the latter text? Did Duras deliberately fictionalize some details, as she did with Rabier's name, thus making a significant if above-board exception to her unequivocal statement (It's out of respect for the wife and child of that man, called here Rabier, she writes, that...I take the precaution of not calling him by his real name [90, 71])? Did she change some details in order to render her more dramatic, as Lesl ie Hill suggests she did in the first autobiographical text in the volume, La Douleur (125-26)? Or are the mistakes due simply to faulty memory? While an attempt to determine a final truth about the historical events recounted in Monsieur X. would be very naive indeed, taking note of the variances between different versions of the is, again, worthwhile, for such an analysis reveals something about how remembering and narrating-activities in which the authors of and actors in these two narratives are inevitably engaged-intersect. An analysis of the several different voices and moods in Duras's and Pean's texts allows us to explore how memory-often though of as a fragmented, disorderly, and unreliable source-and narration-an inherently completing, ordering, and meaning-imposing force-both can and cannot be reconciled in the genesis of a historical or autobiographical narrative. In the first half of the this essay, I will look at Monsieur X. by itself, paying particular attention to elements of its narration such as mood, tense, and chronology. In doing so I will explore in Monsieur X. the relation between what Gerard Genette calls story (the signified or contents) and narrative (the signifier, statement, discourse or text itself) (27). …

Why is reality a troubling concept?

Many psychoanalysts assume that modern philosophy has revealed that objective reality is an illusion, and they take that as their starting point for discussing psychic reality and the direction of treatment. However, the philosophical argument for the antiobjectivist position, far from being a final truth, can be seen as a late echo of the age-old debate over whether it is possible to match unchanging general descriptions to the changing individuals in the world. It is but one of two competing philosophical positions (postulating either a world of incomparable individuals or a world of abstract properties), neither of which can definitively vanquish its rival without violating common sense. The underlying, specifically psychoanalytic problem that stirs these recent debates is not the philosophical problem of reality, but rather the question of what it can mean to say that someone is realistic in regard to the world of human values, roles, and relationships. Analytic tradition begins the inquiry by suggesting that realisticness about human meaning is a matter of feeling out the potentialities of the human world by multiple affective attachments. Many questions remain to be answered.

Lucidity and science III: Hypercredulity, quantum mechanics, and scientific truth

Scientific research can reasonably be described as a search for truth, in an important and nontrivial sense. But respect for the scientific ideal is incompatible with the myth, or instinctive, quasi-religious belief, that science is about discovering final, infallible, absolute or ultimate truth. That myth, if publicly endorsed by scientists, inadvertently or otherwise, is perilous because it fuels tribal conflicts like the current 'science wars' and increases public confusion about science. This in turn helps the psychological, social, and economic forces, including the forces within big commerce, that work toward discrediting the scientific ideal and ethic for reasons both conscious and unconscious, restricting our options for coping with an uncertain and highly dangerous future. Future possibilities include the risk of substantial sea level rise, continuing unstoppably for a century or more after first detection. Also possible – and arguably likely if the scientific ideal is too far discredited – is the destruction of the system of free market democracy and free trade, the government by consent and prosperity of individuals on which big commerce itself depends.Our understanding of the actual and potential human behaviour patterns that might lead to such destruction is being sharpened by evidence from linguistics, palaeoclimatology, palaeoanatomy, and genetics, and from research on perception and cognition. It is remarkable that any such self-understanding is possible for us, and even more remarkable that any human society allows such matters to be openly discussed. Both things demonstrate our species' adaptability and the power of cultural evolution – more precisely the adaptive power of the intimate and intricate interplay, or dynamic, of what we falsely dichotomise as 'nature and nurture'. This adaptive power is one reason why our children and their descendents might dare, against the odds, to hope for some kind of civilised future existence incorporating a new covenant between science and society.

Herodes - die Grote?

Herod - The Great?. The claim to historical understanding is more than simply quoting from ancient sources. Not only must anachronism and ethnocentrism be dealt with in order not to make the ancients mere instruments of modem preferences, but the sources themselves must be carefully interpreted so that we do not become victims of their propaganda. The challenge of historical understanding with sincerity and fairness is illustrated in this study of Herod the Great, king of the Judaeans. Studying history is not to aim at the discovery of final truth, but to participate in the conversation about truth, and therefore the self-reflection and self-discovery implied by historical exploration.

Between the landscape and its other

Paul Vanderbilt called himself an iconographer - and his achievements define the term. From 1942 to 1945, he transformed the files of Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration photographic survey into an innovative historical resource, now treasured for its ability to suggest surprising connections and new directions for study. As archivist and curator for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, he pioneered intuitive, unorthodox approaches to organizing vast collections of visual materials. In the course of his remarkable career, Vanderbilt revolutionized the way we see and use representations of all kinds - and turned filing into an art form. Between the Landscape and Its Other is literally a life's work, illustrating and explaining Vanderbilt's most important ideas about visual images. The book features 50 of the famous pairings of his landscape photographs from the 1960s with archival photographs from the renowned collection he developed in Madison. In each case, the images appear unrelated. But connections emerge intuitively - according to Vanderbilt, by the same unconscious process that organizes mental images into complex and revealing composites. Vanderbilt's evocative text, along with quotations from James Agee, Robert Frost, Catherine Duncan, Igor Stravinsky, and others, further extends possible meanings and relationships. Throughout the book, Vanderbilt addresses both theoretical and practical details of his work. He describes how he selects and organizes photographs for display. For six of the pairings, he provides extensive analysis of how the images work together to suggest qualities that can not be photographed directly. He comments on art, photography, landscape, language, psychology, values, and the illusions of definition. And he explains his own approach to landscape photography, relating his concern for character, aura, and magic. Between the Landscape and Its Other is an elegant summation of Vanderbilt's lifelong convictions: that pursuit is more valuable than achievement, that final truth is never attainable, that art is a viewpoint rather than a medium, and that science is not the only - or the definitive - kind of knowledge. Paul Vanderbilt was an art museum librarian, a consultant in iconography at the Library of Congress, editor of Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration photographic survey of America, and curator/archivist and field photographer for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. He died in 1992, while this book was in its final stages of production.

Interaction design at the Utrecht School of the Arts

The "Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht" (Utrecht School of the Arts, Utrecht, The Netherlands) offers a four-year curriculum in interaction design (roughly equivalent to an MA) and a one year master of arts degree in interactive multimedia. The material here presents our approach to interaction design as a discipline and the curriculum that embodies this approach. It features a collection of thoughts and snapshots-- we regard it as work in progress. Interaction design is a new field. It is growing fast, continuously adapting to new circumstances. We believe in our approach, but do not regard it as the final truth. There will be questions, as well as answers. Your comments, criticisms and suggestions are appreciated!

Construct no idols

Abstract A constructivist perspective views knowledge as indeterminate. Human beliefs bear no necessary direct relationship to reality, yet we tend to objectify them and treat them as real. I liken this tendency to idolatry, the xwrship of a created image as though it were the ultimate. Idolatry occurs when we believe that we know a final truth. I consider some implications of this metaphor for constructivist thought, including the notion that hypotheses originally served only to account for observations, but with the success of modern science, people have come to treat them as though they represent truth. To transcend idolatry requires active recognition that humans invent constructs and that our understanding of reality requires awareness of the central role of human participation. We might facilitate this process by becoming more aware of the metaphorical use of language. I discuss a technique from semantics, which elaborates on Kelly's suggestion that we view language as invitational, as a useful tool...

Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Robert Stone/Isabel Allende/Charles McCarry/Marge Piercy/Gore Vidal (review)

Reviewed by: Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Robert Stone/Isabel Allende/Charles McCarry/Marge Piercy/Gore Vidal Mark Osteen William Zinsser , ed. Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Robert Stone/Isabel Allende/Charles McCarry/Marge Piercy/Gore Vidal. Boston: Houghton, 1989. 167 pp. pb. $8.95. Its title notwithstanding, this collection of essays by five novelists never develops a definition of the political novel. The essays are a mixed bag: Stone's is alter-nately [End Page 357] flinty and high-minded; Allende's mystical and hopeful; McCarry's anecdotal and aphoristic; Piercy's earnest; Vidal's defensively self-congratulatory. This is not a book for scholars, unless they have very thick skin. Full of ill-informed academic bashing, it is bound to be irritating to those expecting theoretically sophisticated discussions of ideology and politics in fiction. Piercy, for example, makes the astonishing claim that contemporary academics resist fiction that espouses left-wing causes; Vidal contends that academics seek some final Truth pleasing to University trustees but available only to their squirrelly selves. As descriptions of the current politics of literary criticism these sentiments are both naïve and inaccurate. Antirealist novelists such as Gass and Robbe-Grillet also take their share of abuse, especially from Stone and Allende, for abdicating their political responsibility. This criticism seems lame, however, when Stone then asserts that the writer's only social responsibility is to write well. If one need only write well, why does it matter whether one is politically conscious or not? These logical and factual flaws taint the reader's appreciation for the more enlightening points that sometimes follow. McCarry's piece is by far the best, advancing helpful distinctions between propaganda and fiction (the first involves belief; the second knowledge) and comparing the novel to a strip of exposed film to be developed differently by each reader, an analogy that illuminates both the rhetorical power and political potential of good fiction. Yet this analogy contradicts his claim that (again) the writer's only duty is to write well. If creation is collaborative, surely a writer's duty also involves anticipating some of the consequences of such collaborations, especially if, as McCarry announces, the political novelist must "believe in consequences." The worst piece is Vidal's, which, aside from his salutary reminder that historical "facts" are always subject to scholarly biases, is mostly an excuse to snipe at critics of his novel Lincoln. He scores some palpable hits, but one doubts whether this book is the proper place for such attacks. Nevertheless, each essay contains something useful, especially in regard to the practice of writing fiction; Piercy's descriptions of plotting and organization are especially useful. Other highlights include Stone's defense of the greater moral value of good fiction, in which he maintains that idealized versions of ourselves enable us to extend our capacity for social action. Allende's loosely organized essay offers a refreshing call for more optimistic fiction that will enable oppressed groups to discover their own voices and resist quietism and despair. Like Stone, she adheres to the moral and political imperatives by which fiction enhances the sense of community. And although none ever clearly defines the "political novel," Piercy's assertion that in a stratified society "all literature is engaged politically" comes closest to a satisfactory attempt. In sum, although often contradictory and sometimes illogical, these essays are never boring; occasionally they are even provocative. [End Page 358] Mark Osteen Loyola College in Maryland Copyright © 1991 Purdue Research Foundation

A Comment on Positive Theory

The Association allows its members to identify themselves as theorists. I am a member who so identifies himself. Over several years, numerous political scientists (not themselves positive theorists) have asked me (sarcastically) whether positive theory is the opposite of negative theory. In each case, to avoid heaping sarcasm upon sarcasm, I answered that the word positive, in this case, referred to positivism, as in Comte's Philosophy and Polity. It referred to the assignment of a central role to observing phenomena and discovering the laws that relate them, and doing so gradually and laboriously, and, as Comte already understood and Weber makes crystal clear, without ever coming to final Truth. It did not refer to plus or minus signs. What I left out is that the word 'positive was in fact used early on in contradistinction to negative thought. But it may be useful to do so impersonally, for the information of those who seem unfamiliar with the ideas of our founders. The early positivists understood that human beings need to make sense of experience. They also understood the arduousness of doing so by theory based on and tested by observation, especially in the case of phenomena more complex than, say, astronomical motion. This, they argued, accounted for resorts to pseudoexplanations: to theological or metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. That sort of thought was negative thought ---negative, because not resting on solid bases and likely to do more harm than good. The early positivists were convinced that positive thought would gradually triumph over negative, fetishistic thinking, in all fields---spreading slowly from the simplest to the most complex phenomena. Surely, they have been substantially right, although they underestimated the continued appeals of high-flown obscurantism in the social sciences. Positive thought also had a secondary meaning early on, related to its primary meaning. It arose in the wake of the French Revolution, and involved a reaction against that revolution's guiding idea: that utopian transformation could be achieved by simple negative action: getting rid of feudal or similar constricting relations. One reaction to the revolution's failure to

Existentialism and the Law: Hamrick on Merleau-Ponty

Anglo-American legal thought is caught in a conceptual dilemma that mirrors the larger world. In the law, we have as one side of the dilemma those duty-based theories (whether positivist or natural) that see rules as the law's center. Such theories attribute a privilege or special force, for one deciding a present case, to commitments made in the past. In other words, what we do now is to be decided by its conformity to standards earlier determined. Similar ideas exist outside the law. For example, to believe that an author's intentions control the interpretation of a novel or poem is to be a literary strict constructionist. It is ethical strict constructionism to believe that moral duties are determined by rules. On the other side of the dilemma, it is a sort of realism to judge literature by its contribution to a social order (socialist realism), just as it is to believe that a judge's choice of action in a present case should be determined not by rules, but by the outcome it would produce. In ethics, looking to the future in that way is called utilitarianism. The dilemma of the law is the seemingly irresoluble conflict between these two competing views: whether we should look to the past or to the future to resolve a present case. Proponents of these views have wrestled for somewhere near two centuries to a weary standstill. The current dissatisfaction with both comes in part from frustration at the inability of either to pin the other to the mat. But it is more than irresolubility that is causing problems today. Each lays claim to final truth, despite either's inability to defeat the other. These claims to a truth that preempts any privately reached understand-

Timing of levodopa therapy.

The introduction of levodopa in the treatment of parkinsonism 1,2 marked a milestone in changing the perceptions of neurology as academically rich but therapeutically sterile. A classic degenerative disorder became a treatable neurotransmitter deficiency. Discoveries in medicine tend to follow the outline of an electrocardiogram, with the P representing initial interest, Q the initial doubt, R the bandwagon, S the backlash, and T the final truth. 3 With levodopa therapy we are somewhere between the S and the T. Dr Melamed marshalls the results of a large number of clinical and experimental studies to support his view that levodopa administration eventually limits its own usefulness. Hence, levodopa treatment should be delayed as long as possible. Drs Markham and Diamond argue from their results in three groups of parkinsonian patients that the slope of deterioration is the same regardless of the time of initiation of therapy. Hence, levodopa treatment should not

James and Modernism: Some Further Interventions

Paul B. Armstrong. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 242 + xiv pp. Stuart Hutchinson. Henry James: An American as Modernist. New York and London: Barnes & Noble; Vision Press, 1983.136 pp. Janet Holmgren McKay. Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.212 + x pp. William Stowe. Balzac, James and the Realistic Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 203 + xviii pp. Edward Wagenknecht. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983. 329 + vi pp. The question is, what is there left to write about Henry James? If we listen to John Carlos Rowe in his Henry Adams and Henry James (1975), there is still left the job of translating our perceptions of James into the idiom of our own moment. Rowe is strongly seconded by some phenomenologists who propose an end to speculation about James and a beginning, through some scientific method, of finding out the final truth at last. Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (1976) certainly lights a path to new explorations and promulgates a study often hinted but never so fully seen when she chastizes those who wish to "moralize the text" in seeking refuge "in the distinctions of another, more epistemologically stable world" (p. 11). Others, variously, have also touched some important and productive Jamesian motifs recently: Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination (1977), interestingly cognate with Yeazell in his demonstration of both Balzac's and James's focus on the melodramatic as an imitation of bathos but as arising from "the desacralized remnants of sacred myth" left in the wake of the French Revolution; Stephen Donadio in Nietzsche, Henry James and the Artistic Will (1978) where Nietzschean will stands between weak man and chaos; Strother Purdy in The Hole in the Fabric (1977) who sees clearly how the "progressive breakdown in stability and fixity" of our concept of the universe has cut us loose from our sense of the absolute authority of the cosmos in defining the significances of objects and systems and who thus provides a gloss on the epistemological instability of the environment of James's late novels in much the same sense as Yeazell has presented it. Nor do the editors of the recently founded Henry James Review believe that James studies to date have exhausted the values of his work.

THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST “I” AS IRONIST: TOWARD ALTERNATIVE WORLDS*

Symbolic Interactionist Irony (SII) has as its aspiration, possibility, and achievement the creation of alternative worlds of seeing and doing. The constituent features of irony as detached from and skeptical of all available perspectives elevate its status to that as transcendental of extant reality. The internal logic‐of‐discovery and reflexive mood of SII conclude that all knowledge have an inseparable personal and autonomous basis. Hence, there are alternative ways but no final way of knowing. Knowledge without final truth value is–and can only be–an alternative world of seeing and doing. Nonetheless, an ironic alternative world is seen as an emergent that has its own integrity from the interaction of facts against analytic perspectives. The works of Erving Goffman and Joseph R. Gusfield, and their roots in the writings of Kenneth Burke, are read as having conceptual resonance for SII as an intellectual style. An ironic reading is thus offered of how SII practice is possible and how this practice refocuses the worlds of seeing and doing.

The Disunity of Science

A question which has long concerned epistemologists and philosophers of science is whether science is a process which can be expected at some time to reach a terminus. If one does suppose that science will one day be finished, it is clear that one requires a conception of its scope. If, for example, one thought that it consisted of a loosely connected collection of more or less independent theories designed to meet particular theoretical or practical interests, then the view that science might one day be finished would require the extremely incautious prediction that we would at some point cease to acquire any new interests. On the other hand, a position which lends considerable support to the conception of science as converging on a terminus of final truth is the belief that it is in the process of being unified. Such unification is conceived of as proceeding by means of the reduction of each part of science to the science which deals with the structural components of the objects studied by the first science; and since this process is transitive, it follows that if it were to continue to completion, all of science would have been reduced to particle physics. And this provides a rather startling answer to the question about the scope of science: in a strong sense this is just particle physics. It is true that working out the details of the reductions might be complicated and tedious; but the only fundamental scientific laws would be those of particle physics. If any new scientific problems were to arise we would always know in principle how to solve them, i.e., by finding out what was going on at the microphysical level. This is the kind of reductionism which I shall be arguing against in this paper, and the falsity of which is implied by its title. Before getting down to serious arguments, it is necessary to distinguish between some very different reductionist theses that are sometimes proposed. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction that needs to be made is that between reduction in principle and reduction in fact. In metaphysics generally, and particularly in the philosophy of mind, it is frequently thought important to assert the

Plato: Philebus (review)

Book Reviews Plato: Philebus. Trans., with notes and comm., J. C. B. Gosling. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Pp. xxii + 238. $15.50) This volume is part of the Clarendon Plato Series, a series of translation-plus-commentary volumes designed especially for persons who wish to make a philosophical study of Plato's dialogues but who do not know ancient Greek. The translations in this series are aimed first of all at faithfulness to the original; elegance of English style is of subordinate importance. In his preface Gosling admits that much of the English of his translation is cumbersome but defends this as an attempt to give the reader some idea of the relationships and ambiguities in the original Greek. Uniform translation of certain Greek terms can at times produce awkward English, but the uniformity enables the reader to recognize in different passages that the same term is being used. When such uniformity has proved to be impossible (as in the case of the words psuche and al~th~s), Gosling has inserted parenthetically a transliteration of the Greek word in passages where it occurs. This technique is quite beneficial to readers who want to follow Plato's terminology closely. Gosling's interpretative work on the dialogue consists of an introduction and a general commentary , both of which are devoted to general problems of interpretation, and a set of notes devoted to more particular questions, including questions of text and translation. A certain amount of technical philological discussion is necessitated by the many textual difficulties of the Philebus. When discussing textual problems Gosling often inserts transliterations in order to provide the reader who does not know Greek with some idea of the dispute. With many exceptions he has translated Burnet's text. Given the aim of the Clarendon Plato Series and Gosling's prefatory remarks about his translation, one would expect the translation to be more consistently literal than it is. There are points at which the English rendering is admittedly interpretative, in addition to a number of other places where the rendering is not literal. Also, there are a few instances of nonuniformity in translation. The verbal adjective hairetos, a word of some importance in the Philebus, is usually rendered "desirable" (but also "worth choosing," 21e4) in the text of tho dialogue, while in the commentary it is apparently rendered "chooseable" (p. 182). Some explanation is called for of the meaning of the Greek term (one that can be troublesome for philosophical analysis) and of the various renderings. In addition, both bios eudaim~n at 1ld6 and agapr bios at 61e8 are translated "most desirable life." The use of "desirable" as a translation for three Greek adjectives suggests a verbal consistency not present in the Greek. Certain important uses of einai are not translated literally. For example, at 58a2 to on is translated "the final truth" (with defense in a note), and at 59d4 to on ontOs is rendered "the real truth." The sentence at 59a7-9 is translated: "Our man, in fact, has undertaken a labour on present, future and past events, not on unchanging truths (onta)." Compare Hackforth's version: "Then the task which such students amongst us have taken upon themselves has nothing to do with that which always is, but only with what is coming into being, or will come, or has come." Hackforth's more literal translation of ta onta aei, and of ta gignomena kai gen~somena kai gegonota more effectively brings out the contrast between the verbs einai (to be) and gignesthai (to come to be). [221] 222 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY It should be mentioned that where Gosling's translation of important terms is not literal the use of transliterations in parentheses is quite helpful. And he often explains and defends his translations in the notes, at times providing a more literal translation for comparison. (There is no note on 17a3-5, however, where Plato's contrast between eristic and dialectical argument is expressed in translation as a contrast between "sophistical" and "philosophical" argument. The Greek terms should have been mentioned, and the reader should have been referred to an earlier note [on 1665-7] that provides the explanation for the translation.) In...

Ideology and Literary Studies: A Dilemma

Though Frederick Crews (PMLA, 85, 1970, 423-28; 86, 1971, 280-81) appears to solve the problem of the relation of literary studies to ideology, his animadversions imply a program that actually conceals what remains an insoluble dilemma. If he talks plausibly about "the possibilities for vital knowledge" in criticism, in the end he offers only a new version of an old approach that allows a surrender of literature and criticism to ideology. Because the issue is of continuing importance, let us uncover the program he would substitute for the one he finds almost everyone else unwittingly adhering to. What, for Crews, are the relations among literature, criticism, and history? The answer is complex. When he mentions "the waning historical vitality of the formalist paradigm" (in response to his critics) and deplores "an absence" in scholars "of feeling for historical dynamics" (in his original essay), he gives us clues to his program. "Formalist esthetics," he asserts, has done a valuable service by engaging in an "energetic critique of impressionism." But now, having done its duty, formalism must be replaced by something else, just as impressionism presumably did a service by providing a critique of whatever it replaced. By showing to be "both true and important" ... "the root assumption that literature conveys class meaning," critics like Georg Lukacs provide what is needed now. Crews, who has "feeling for historical dynamics," must see criticism as constantly in need of change as new historical circumstances arise. But if the history of criticism reveals changing assumptions about literature, it also lets us see critics in successive ages wrestling again and again with similar problems, and only a few criticsperhaps including Lukacs, perhaps not-qualifying as new in any radical sense. This view of criticism as constantly in need of change has serious consequences: criticism must answer to matters other than literature, with literature itself denied any special nature of its own. The clue here lies in Crews's statement about Lukacs' demonstration of the "truth" of an "assumption" about literature and class meaning. If Lukacs has assumed "that literature conveys class meaning" and then developed a criticism from this assumption, he has not demonstrated a truth but has only argued in a circle. But in similarly circular fashion any critic may demonstrate the truth of his assumptions.l If what Crews means is only that Lukaics has finally demonstrated the truth in what some critics have long assumed, then the same should hold as well for the parallel "truths" the formalists and even the impressionists demonstrated. Surely-and Crews seems to grant as much-the formalists must have had some claim to truth if they were able to provide their "energetic critique of impressionism." But if literature can thus accommodate Lukacs' truth and the opposed truth of the formalists, its nature becomes obscure indeed. If for Crews literature is no more than what our assumptions make of it-if it exists for whatever social or other uses we can make of it, having no unique function of its own-the word true becomes meaningless when he applies it to criticism. Probably, in Hegelian fashion, Crews would see Lukacs as having arrived at a final truth about literature and class meaning after the only partial truths of earlier critics. But instead of a synthesis of various truths about literature, this is a reduction of literature to a single truth. When he charges that the criticism to be displaced promotes "the illusion of present classlessness-an illusion whose effective function is to ensure compliance with disguised class governance," he would-disclosing his own ideology-assign criticism a role in the class struggle: the "truth" revealed in reducing literature to class meaning would help bring about an actual classless society. When he invites us to recognize the "tacit political assumptions" supporting "disguised class governance," he is at the same time urging us to adopt new assumptions, elevating them as a new "truth" that will enable us in our way to combat such governance.2 But what would ultimately become of literature and criticism after the revolution? In the classless society criticism would have no role: having elucidated class meaning in literature and helped the revolution come to pass, it would have performed its function and could be dispensed with. Literature itself would disappear, having performed its function. With no classes for literature to refer to, the class meaning that Lukacs has enabled us to discern in literature would be in fact no meaning. Whatever literature there might be after the revolution would be utterly different from what we know now. To extrapolate further from Crews's hints, after the revolution-and after literature as we know it would be of interest only to surviving antiquarians"formalist esthetics" might have a place: it could once

Dislocation of the incus. The reliability of tomography.

The present investigation deals with an analysis of the tomographic findings in an earlier published material of dislocations of the incus. Of 34 patients in whom tomography was performed, agreement between the tomographic and surgical findings was found in 22. In nine patients the tomograms were considered not conclusive. In three the discrepancy is more or less unexplainable. The importance of the optimum technique is stressed, and the technique is described and discussed. In six patients the incus could not be found during operation, but is with certainty present at tomography in at least three. The conclusion is that neither a tomographic finding nor a surgical finding is to be considered as the final truth.

Distance still lends enchantment

In a recent article discussing the nature of the Platonic dialogue, there occurs the phrase: And just as it is characteristic of the Socratic conversation to conclude with an admission of ignorance, so it is characteristic of Plato's dialogues to fall short of expressing the final truth: instead, it is brought into view as from a distance.'l kind of view do we of today's world have of Plato's ideal state as we observe it from the distance of centuries? Does the bold and vigorous architecture which embodies his ideal Republic still stand in clear relief? We note one thing immediately. The republic that Plato places before our imagination is a republic of the living, not a homeland of structure and society first, the individual second. The real question for this society, as pointed out by Francis Cornford, is What is the right way to live?2 Given both the individual and society, what desires should be cultivated? impulses should be satisfied to achieve a perfect society? How can one satisfy desires and still be a good person? Plato does not ignore duty; but, he is much more concerned with happinesspersonal happiness. He accepts two kinds of analysis: that of the ideal state