Kind Of Truth Research Articles

The Hegemony of Capitalism in the 2024 Indonesia General Election

This article explains how the operation of hegemonic power of capitalism works in the 2024 election in Indonesia, both in the presidential and legislative elections. The hegemonic power refers to the third-dimensional power introduced by Lukes, namely power in the ideological realm. This article argues that capitalism hegemony “grasps” all dominant narratives that emerged during the 2024 elections, both from election participants and civil societies. By using the concept of ideological cynicism introduced by Žižek, this article explains that capitalism in the ideological realm can be so effective because it appears not as an ideology, but as a kind of truth believed by everyone.

On ways of being true

There are many ways for truths to be true. How should we understand that idea? One is that there are different kinds of truth: the ways are different truth-like properties. Another understanding is that a truth can be made true in different ways, by different kinds of entities. The former understanding supports alethic pluralism. But the latter can be understood as a kind of monism: truth is the existential property of having some truthmaker or other. On this view, the differences reside in how a truth is made true, but not in its being true. I’ll discuss how these two understandings differ and what the potential advantages of the latter idea might be.

Post-truth, conspiracy, and fake news in the uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic in Morocco

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the truth about the virus and its implications were at issue and were the object of a heated debate, nationally and globally. Because of the novelty of that experience, convergent truths emerged in Morocco, exacerbating the uncertainty that was already prevailing. This article examines these convergent truths, their epistemological bases, claims, and resources. This analysis shows the existence of different powers and strategies to which different truths are linked. The creative truth upheld by the existing dominant power, drawing, for legitimacy, on empirical scientific knowledge and claiming control over the situation. The esoteric truth based on conspiracy theories, political conflict, or the religious doctrine of fatalism and popular culture was supported and diffused through social media and gained traction among the public, already distrustful of the dominant narrative and of the scientific expertise. While other forms of truths existed in this post-truth era, this article focuses on these two kinds of truth, and examines how both were constitutive of two antagonistic discourses that used different kinds of propaganda including even fake news or alternative facts to provide (false or emotional) grounds for their claims. The scrutiny of the interactions between these discourses through media texts showed that while the government used propagandistic (pseudo)scientific messages to control the population and reinforce its authority, with little regard for people’s doubts, worries, and fears, the social media users formed different clusters of like-minded people and resisted the dominant narrative taking advantage of the growing distrust of the government among the population and the communication blunders of some public policy officials.

One but not the Same

The paper aims at identifying similarities and differences between two different ways of using the word “true”, on the one hand when it is used to refer to a property of what we say or believe, here called “words’ truth”, on the other when it is used to refer to a feature of things in general (as when we say “he is a true friend”), here called “things’ truth”. I will point out how such similarities and differences may be usefully described starting from the feature of truth called “transparency” which is often considered as exclusively pertaining to words’ truth. The upshot of the paper will be that Aquinas was right in considering the two kinds of truth as species of the unique genus “adaequatio rei et intellectus”, but that this conclusion can be reached without any commitment to the ideology (in the Quinean sense) of the correspondence theory of truth.

The Right to Truth in Colombia's Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition. A Direct Approach to the Intrinsic Relationship between its Mechanisms and Objectives

The peace deal between the Colombian Government and the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia established the Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition, comprised of the Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition Commission, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and the Unit for the Search of Persons Presumed Disappeared in the context and because of the armed conflict. This set of mechanisms guarantee the rights to truth, justice, reparation, and measures of non-recurrence as stipulated in the Final Agreement for the Termination of the Armed Conflict and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace. One of its most critical and imperative aspects is the right to truth for the victims of serious human rights violations and their relatives. This right, conceived primarily as a human right, coexists with the other three pillars of transitional justice, interacting and complementing them. This paper aims to define the content of the right to truth in the three bodies that make up the Comprehensive System, to conclude that, although each mechanism pursues a different kind of truth, there is a bond of complementarity between them, addressing the rights of its victims and their needs, structuring a collective memory on the war in Colombia.

THE NOVEL IN THE WORK OF RUSSIAN WRITERS OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY

The beginning of the 20th Century marked an era of unprecedented and radical changes in social structures, economic systems, and political organizations among other spheres of life. Various literary schools of thought developed and each had a distinct artistic approach and ideological aspects. The Russian literature developed as a major way to learn about the Russian culture and worldview coupled with ways of loving, fighting, and expression. This period ranks as the Silver Age of the Russian literature and it served the urgent mission to provide the Russian citizens with a kind of truth, which could only be conveyed through literature in a censored society.

Lose Your Father

Lose Your Father

Necessity of The Abhidhamma for The Interpretation of Early Buddhist Discourses

This paper presents an overview about the necessity of the Abhidhamma for interpreting several main teachings found in the early Buddhist discourses. The study is based on the Tipiṭaka and some other information taken from exegetical literatures (Aṭṭhakathā). Several important points found in the early Buddhist discourses are critically analyzed in the light of the Abhidhamma. It is found that certain points referring the two kinds of truths which have not been clearly distinguished in the early discourses, are made clear in the Abhidhamma by introducing the two kinds truths, namely sammutisacca and paramatthasacca. Furthermore, some controversial matters such as the doctrine of puggala promulgated by some Buddhist schools, and the wrong views of eternalists and nihilists which are often stated in the early Buddhist discourses but yet not so much discussed, are successfully refuted in the Abhidhamma. Thus, the present study has highlighted the importance of Abhidhamma in giving a better explanation regarding some important and controversial points found in the early discourses.

Science, Scripture, and Self: Epistemological Implications of Psalm 19

This article suggests three ways that the psalm advances a biblical approach to epistemology. First, this psalm implies that some kinds of truth may be learned through careful observation. Psalm 19 as an invitation to seek the truth through scientific study in the form of disciplined observation, discovery, and analysis. If creation is speaking, then we must learn how to listen and hear its voice. Second, this psalm declares that truth can be learned from the Torah, the revealed word of God. Torah is a kind of knowledge that cannot be discovered; it must be revealed (Job 11:7-8; Romans 11:33). God’s self-revelation is a gift of God to humanity, discerned relationally; therefore, it cannot be discovered by searching, even if the search is enhanced by microscopes, telescopes, or microwave kinetic inductance detectors. Third, Psalm 19 invites us to discover ourselves. Moral and spiritual progress requires self-examination and transformation. Beholding God’s glory in creation and hearing God’s word through the Torah provide the orientation that is necessary for us to face the truth about ourselves.

Writing Radically as Women With Virginia Woolf: Why?

In a short essay titled “Why,” Virginia Woolf daringly questioned the ways in which knowledge is produced, performed, and proclaimed as particular kinds of truths in institutions of power and authority, including academic writing. She subversively suggested, “The little twisted sign that comes at the end of the question has a way of making the rich writhe” and advised that such questions choose their “asking place with care”. In this article, we suggest that the “post” scholarship moment is the moment to ask new questions about the ways Woolfian inspired life-writing as a performance of self and social worlds might be engaged to trouble and open up what the “product” and performance of academic work, words, and worlds might come to be.

Realism, non-realism and the African performer

The camera, the film, the television and globalization have finished the work the Realists, the Naturalists and Konstantin Stanislavski began. Whereas, for millennia, African art was ideologically non-Realist, realism – one might say, Western realism – has swept the board. I say ‘ideologically’, perhaps the better word is ‘aesthetically’. There were artists who believed that capturing a likeness was worth it, but these were relatively few and far between. The idea of art – hence ‘ideologically’ – for most artists was not to copy. Verisimilitude was not a goal. What was the point? Art was art and reality was reality – two different things. For the artist, the imagination rather than observation was paramount. African artists sought to express the symbolic, the spiritual, the decorative or the usefulness of their subjects. Theatre artists over the ages and in different parts of the world have sought the truth but there are many kinds of truth and therefore many ways in which theatre artists have expressed it. There can’t be many artists who do not strive to be truthful – though religion, politics and capitalism have their fair share of those who don’t – and these have shown that realism has no monopoly of the truth. Africans are now so acculturated that many no longer understand artistic non-real expression and when confronted by it either show no interest or search for ways to reconcile it with their realist expectations. Nevertheless, in the present time, it is the theatre, along with sculpture and visual art, that is still rooted in the origins of African art. African non-realism thrives in the theatres of Africa and nowhere more than in South Africa. Though this is so, i.e., that indigenous theatre in South Africa, to a large extent, creates its spectacles in the spirit of African realism, the universities, it would seem, still tend to teach most aspects of performance according to the gospels of European and North American realism. This phenomenon might not be entirely restricted to South Africa, though, owing to the hegemony of Western culture in South Africa, it is probably a lot more entrenched there than elsewhere. There are those who, in the spirit of decolonizing the university syllabus, are giving this anomaly serious attention. In the interests of theatre, their efforts deserve to be supported.

Truth in Practical Reason: Practical and Assertoric Truth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Truth has always been a controversial subject in Aristotelian scholarship. In most cases, including some well-known passages in the Categories, De Interpretatione and Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the predicate ‘true’ for assertions, although exceptions are many and impossible to ignore. One of the most complicated cases is the concept of practical truth in the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics: its entanglement with action and desire raises doubts about the possibility of its inclusion to the propositional model of truth. Nevertheless, in one of the most extensive studies on the subject, C. Olfert has tried to show that this is not only possible but also necessary. In this paper, we explain why trying to fit practical truth into the propositional model comes with insurmount­able problems. In order to overcome these problems, we focus on multiple aspects of practical syllogism and correlate them with Aristo­tle’s account of desire, happiness and the good. Identifying the role of such concepts in the specific steps of practical reasoning, we reach the conclusion that practical truth is best explained as the culmination of a well-executed practical syllogism taken as a whole, which ultimately explains why this type of syllogism demands a different approach and a different kind of truth than the theoretical one.

The Existentialism of Feminist Extratextual Reality in Carol Maso’s The Art Lover

The postmodern text takes on the experimental challenge of confronting the lack of a center at the heart of language and dwelling in that void. Carol Maso accesses that void to confront issues of selfhood and authorship in her postmodern novel, The Art Lover (1990). Maso clearly understands that the conventional novel is predicated upon dominant ideologies of truth and identity, as well as on realism rather than existential reality. For her, it fails to represent truthfully the chaos of the world outside the authentic existential experience. She therefore consciously writes differently in order to tell some kind of truth about herself. Yet, as Dwight Eddins observes, by opting out of long-established literary conventions, postmodern authors like Maso are placed in a dilemma: “In humanizing this world, [s/]he lies; in trying not to lie [s/]he is threatened by incoherence and chaos” (205). Maso avoids the problem by fusing experimental writing with narrative conventions. Meanwhile, in her non-fictional writing, Maso asks, “What is a book and how might it be reimagined, opened up, transformed to accommodate all we've seen, … been hurt by … given … taken away?” In using the inclusive term, “we”, she recommends this experimental approach to other marginalized (oppressed or subjugated) authors. In the fiction itself, she indicates a means by which other marginalized female authors can emancipate themselves from the stultifying boundaries of fiction and the stereotypical identities /realities created for them by long-established literary convention. As an embodiment of this question about this project to re-imagine the book, The Art Lover , also invites marginalized readers to reread predetermined notions of a centered identity and accepted reality. Maso invites them to test her theories of the constructed nature of reality in their own lives. The multi-layered text of The Art Lover discusses both authorship and existential experience through the narratives of a fictional author, Caroline Chrysler, and that of the doubly fictional characters in the novel she is writing. Caroline distills something of her own fictional life into her fictional narrative both textually and through the insertion of a variety of intertexts in various media. But it is not just the fictional Caroline, who interpolates her life experience into the text of a novel. The real-world novelist, Carole Maso, does the same. Maso herself appears as a character in the fifth section of the novel, where she reveals that she is, in reality, dealing with the death of her best friend, Gary, who has died of AIDS. Arguably, Maso uses her novel – on a variety of levels - to carve out a space for herself where she can tell the “truth” of her lived experience as a woman and an author. Keywords: Existential Experience; Experimental Writing; Narrative Techniques; Embedded Narrative; and Marginalized Female Authors. DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/84-04 Publication date: December 31 st 2021

Populism and the separation of power and knowledge

Not long ago, under the influence of Michel Foucault, one spoke of the conjunction of knowledge and power, but in this post-truth era power appears singularly uninterested in knowledge, even as the supporters of Donald Trump claim that he alone of all politicians speaks the truth. This essay proposes to examine the relations of power and knowledge under the present populist assault. This analysis begins in the work of Claude Lefort, who spoke of the separation of knowledge and power in democracy’s symbolic regime, and is then counterposed to Ernesto Laclau’s understanding of ‘populist reason’ in order to explore the present torsion of this relation to the point where power can appear not just separated from, but opposed to knowledge. It will be argued that it is less a question of post-truth than of different forms of truth with different truth claims, borne by different imperatives, and tied to different forms of representation – truth claims that can, in relation to each other, be indifferent, complementary, or conflictual. With this in mind, the essay asks: what is the relation of the people to truth? Do those who claim to represent the people seek possession of a different kind of truth? What is the relation of populism to ideology? And what is populism’s relation to ‘post-modernism’?

Between Idyll and Catastrophe: The Ethics of Redemption in Dostoevsky's “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”

In general, readers of Dostoevsky's “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” can be divided into three main groups. The first, considers the story to be an example of Dostoevsky's faith in humanity's spiritual rebirth and its protagonist as a character who undergoes transformative change from metaphysical indifference to faith. The second reads the story as a narrative of an un‐self‐aware egoist, who corrupts the truth driven by a will to power. The third group avoids taking a stand on the ethical fortitude of the story's protagonist and instead focuses on pointing out the ambiguities of the story's message and revealing its built‐in semantic indeterminacy. Such readings declare that the story raises questions that refuse to be easily solved. Among these is the limitations of linguistic expression (what can be expressed and what cannot be, but also what kind of truth can be expressed in what language), the nature of truth and knowledge (spiritual knowledge of the planet's inhabitants vs. the earthly knowledge of the protagonist), the difference and confusion between Paradise and Utopia, between dreams and reality, as well as between the human desire for the perfect world and the (im)possibility of attaining it. In this essay I will explore the nature of the story's ambiguity. I will argue, however, that the multi‐level indeterminacy of the “The Dream” makes it into Dostoevsky's most explicit ‘messianic’ text in which he directly establishes the value of the ethics of redemption of which ambiguity is part and parcel. I attempt to untangle what this means in the context of Dostoevsky's religious philosophy by situating the story within the philosophical context of Dostoevsky's two novels—The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov—in which redemption becomes the primary factor behind the characters’ thoughts and actions. I continue by discussing Dostoevsky's “The Dream” alongside a key twentieth century messianic text by Walter Benjamin, “The Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as well as the notion of the contemporary by Giorgio Agamben. By forming a constellation between Dostoevsky and Benjamin, I hope not only to show the relevance of Dostoevsky's philosophy for our times, but to determine a common philosophical context which helps to elucidate hidden spots in each text, namely the importance of history on Dostoevsky's ethics of redemption and Benjamin's relationship to theology and individual action.

Narrative Geometry in ʿAli Reza Gholami’s Divar (The Wall): New Developments in Iranian War Literature

Holy Defense Literature is the official term applied to a large body of prose and poetry published during and after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) as part of the Islamic Republic’s cultural policy to promote and maintain its Shiite and anti-imperialistic political and ideological agenda. Both the production and the critical reception of this body of work have since been gradually altered, resulting in a discrepancy between two mutually exclusive tendencies in the literary representation and interpretation of the Iran–Iraq war: the ideological and the realistic, the latter introducing a narrative alternative to the former. ʿAli Reza Gholami’s novel Divar (The Wall) (2015), however, can be read as an exception to this current creative and critical polarity. By openly renouncing any claim to any kind of truth, Gholami has rendered his highly technical literary creation into a narrative text that goes beyond the real to exert its undermining effect on the ideology of the Holy Defense. Drawing upon Andrew Gibson and Michel Serres, this article attempts to refashion the narrative geometry of Gholami’s novel to underline and elaborate on its destabilizing extra-textual meaning as well as its dialogical and dynamic literary effect.

Trees as Dialogue: Negotiating Boundaries with the Anne Frank Sapling Project

My qualitative research paper focuses on the Anne Frank sapling installation at the Clinton Presidential Museum and Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. Saplings grafted from the tree that grew outside Anne Frank’s window in Amsterdam while she wrote her famous diary are provided by the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect to organizations that will link the tree to dialogues about past and present social justice issues. Building on Thomas Gieryn’s recent work on “truth-spots,” I explore the sapling installation as a possible “truth-spot,” and reflect on what kind of truth is supported there. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, I consider the sapling as a boundary-crossing entity that, together with other elements of the installation, stimulates reflection and inclusive dialogue, and fosters hope without shunning complexity. I discuss the sapling’s ecological needs and material agency, since it is not a passive recipient of human meanings and orchestrations. I also comment on the changing role of museum installations and exhibit space in the context of social justice.

Myth, Allegory and Inspired Symbolism in Early and Late Antique Platonism

Abstract The idea that mythos and logos are incompatible, and that truth is a product of scientific and dialectical thinking, was certainly disproven by later Platonic philosophers. Deploying the works of Hesiod and Homer, Homeric Hymns and other such literature, they considered myth a valuable and significant augment to philosophical discourse. Plato’s denigration of myth gave his followers an incentive to read myth as allegory. The Stoics and first-century philosophers such as Philo, treated allegory as a legitimate interpretive strategy. The Middle Platonists incorporated myth, for example, deifying the Monad and Dyad, as did 2nd century Platonists. Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris (2nd century CE), for example, equates Isis and Osiris with form and matter: the god (Osiris) sows in matter (Isis) logoi (forms or ideas) from himself (De Iside. 372F). Porphyry’s allegorizing of Plato’s Cave of the Nymphs is another example. Plotinus is a strong influence on how the late Neoplatonists regarded myth. This paper argues that these philosophers’ use of allegory prepared the way for the Neoplatonists treatment of myth as inspired symbolism. Proclus and Syrianus, as reported by Hermias, did something more extreme by using mythology to construct inspired symbolic argument. Mythos becomes another type of logos, a vehicle for representing the invisible world of being, another kind of truth that can even serve a function in anagogic ascent.

Perspectives on the Notion of Truth in Arabic Philosophy

Abstract In the present paper, I assume that the notion of “truth” in philosophy would not have been clarified and tackled properly, if philosophers did not take into account earlier Arabic Medieval research contributions and build upon previous research findings. In the first place, I embark on the scrutiny of the rich aspect (or nature) of the Arabic Lexicon in terms of the “truth” meaning. In the second place, I take on the assumption that Arabic linguistic traditions imply different kinds of truths, depending on various spheres of human thoughts and actions based on the logical approach to “truth” (from Al-Kindi up to Averroes via Al-Farabi and Avicenna) and the term “al-haqiqha” as transliterated from Arabic, remain central. In conclusion, I take on an approach to “truth” that gives worth to logical perspectives at the very heart of Medieval Arab traditions in the light of what I would label as the “Omni-cultural Universality of Logic and Science”.

Toward New Kinds of Truths: Staging Toni Morrison with “The Homophonic Trinity”

Toward New Kinds of Truths: Staging Toni Morrison with “The Homophonic Trinity”