Revelation Of Truth Research Articles

Study Analysis: Revelation of Truth, or Murder by Numbers?

Study Analysis: Revelation of Truth, or Murder by Numbers?

THE JOINT INFLUENCE OF ETHICAL HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICE, ETHICAL INVESTOR RELATIONS, ETHICAL CONSUMER RELATIONS AND ETHICAL ADVERTISING ON THE FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE OF LISTED FIRMS IN KENYA.

Purpose: The general objective of this study was to establish the joint influence of ethical human resource practice, ethical investor relations, ethical consumer relations and ethical advertising on the financial performance of listed firms in Kenya.Methodology: Primary data was collected through a semi-structured questionnaire. Secondary data was collected from both the listed firms in the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), and information from the sector regulator, the Capital Markets Authority (CMA). The target population of this study was 64 companies listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) with consistency being evaluated between the years 2011 to 2015. Data analysis was done using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS).Results: The study did a joint regression test for the combined effects of ethical human resource practices, ethical advertising practices, ethical consumer practices and ethical relation practices. In the regression, it was established that, acting jointly, these practices have a positive relationship with the financial performance of listed firms.Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: This study recommends that listed firms need to religiously adhere to conducts of ethical leadership. The departments of human resource should at all times implement their human resource policies with great caution as their mandates, as outlined in the HR policy, influence their organizational performance. The marketing departments should uphold zero tolerance to unethical advertising practices. Also, a feedback platform needs to be included in all advertisements so that profitability is achieved. To the consumers, quality is of priority. Listed firms should formulate ways of always adhering to provision of quality services to consumers. On ethical investor relations, there is need to involve truthful disclosure of information, especially regarding financial statements of the firms. Truthful disclosure of information will uphold investor trust, and subsequently inject more incentives (majorly in the form of financial) for the benefit of the firms. Overally, the study recommends that, by practicing ethical leadership, the firms’ financial performance will greatly improve. The study also suggested that ethical leadership practices should be replicated in non-listed firms and in government agencies.

The Pleasure of the Past in the Present

The Pleasure of the Past in the Present Gordon Hutner (bio) What does the nineteenth century look like to twenty-first-century US novelists? To which novels might nineteenth-century specialists turn to capture a sense of how the era is currently imagined and to what purposes? These are two of the questions sparking my reading over the last few years. Born and raised a nineteenth-century specialist, I tilted toward modern and, more recently, contemporary fiction. Take this report as a way of bridging enthusiasms. My account will not make us see the nineteenth century any more clearly in its contemporaneous context, but it should make a little more vivid what its contemporary meanings might be, for US novelists and for the rest of us. Beyond that, my inquiry considers the abiding and sustaining joy of reading the twenty-first century’s nineteenth century. As I was researching my last book, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (2009), it was relatively easy to find the novels that were admired in their own day but that New Critical literary history and its radical antagonists had since forgotten. That archive depended on a lively print review culture whose record, with a little ingenuity, I could collocate, so that the novels that everyone thought were especially worthwhile but that were now mostly to be retrieved from library sales—a dollar a dozen—might be recovered. And with a little more ingenuity, I could develop a story about the cultural work that this middle-class realism undertook during the mid-twentieth century. Eventually, I wondered whether the same might be done for the novels highly regarded today, since I knew that nearly every one of these would float into critical oblivion too. So I dutifully started to apply my research methods to the most recent books. However, as Huck Finn says, I soon gave up that notion. There just wasn’t the general culture of print reviewing that there had been decades before. Yes, a couple of important new venues had emerged, but they couldn’t replace the dozens of opinion magazines, weekly newspaper supplements, daily reviews, and belles-lettres quarterlies that once did this brokering. There were, as you’d suspect, a vertiginous array of websites, including some where the discussion of new books enjoyed a level of insight and urgency that scholars might find invigorating. But there seemed no ready way to constellate them. You get the picture: there were [End Page 2] lots of places where you could read about this person’s cherished favorite and that one’s grievous disappointment, and you could sometimes encounter eloquent, informative meditations on one title or another, but I was interested in something else—the pleasures of literary history. So my next gambit was to start thinking about the finalists for literary prizes. Over the range of five or six, then ten, later twelve or thirteen prizes, a repository began to take shape, a trove of nearly three hundred novels (through 2013) that I’ve been reading and teaching for the better part of a decade. One award was the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for the best historical novel, conferred by the Society of American Historians. The biannual Cooper Prize distinguishes some pretty good books, but only a couple, like Richard Powers’s Gain (1999) or Philip Roth’s Plot against America (2005), are likely to show up in a literary historian’s table of contents or syllabus. In the current century, Cooper jurors seem to favor the early twentieth century, though they also like the postwar era. Still, these historians have distinguished a few recent novels treating nineteenth-century subjects. The true revelation in my hunt was how often the other prizes do too. So let me share with you some titles that you may find interesting, if you don’t know them already. Great books? Not really. They inhabit the realm of the pretty good; some appeal to a scholarly bent, but some you’ll want to read, if you haven’t already, because they’re fun. Knowing what you know about the nineteenth century, you find at once that little real knowledge translates literally while delighting...

Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing by Amy Holzapfel

Reviewed by: Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeingby Amy Holzapfel Andrew Gibb Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing. By Amy Holzapfel. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. Cloth $148.00; Paper $45.95. Xvi + 227 pages. With this book, Amy Holzapfel achieves nothing less than the complete upending of our long-held assumptions about realism as a dramatic genre. As she correctly points out, theatre scholars have long accepted that realism "sought to produce an exact copy of life on the stage" (2). Not so, argues Holzapfel, who leads us through the stages of the genre's nineteenth-century development, from Eugène Scribe's well-made plays to Gerhart Hauptmann's naturalism. She convincingly demonstrates that realist playwrights, deeply engaged with the scientific and artistic discourses of their times, sought a balance between the desire for objective reproduction of the observable world and the subjective demands of artistry. Holzapfel's great innovation is to contextualize representative plays within period understandings of the philosophy and physiology of vision in order to highlight realism's simultaneous staging of objective and subjective reality. In the space of five chapters, Holzapfel expertly guides her reader through the stages of realism's development, from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. Her progressive argument is supported by the uniform structure of the chapters: she begins each with a representative example of visual art, interprets that work as a translation of prevailing scientific understandings of human vision, then introduces us to the contemporaneous realist dramatists whose works responded to those ideas. In this way, the author makes a strong case for the development of realist drama as an artistic reaction to changing thought about human vision: its creators sought to rescue the ideal of individual creativity and subjectivity from the advance of scientific objectivity. Holzapfel begins her first chapter with references to the genre paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, much admired by philosopheand dramatic critic Denis Diderot. She usefully expands upon the theories of Art Historian Michael Fried to posit character absorption, rather than plot, as the operative factor of the well-made play, an assertion she proves through analyses of plays by Scribe, Sardou, and Dumas fils. Holzapfel effectively demonstrates that these scripts necessitated active stagings that constructed realism "out of actions of the gesturing—seeing and touching—body" (46). The discussion of Émile Zola's naturalism found in Chapter 2 is set up by the documentary photographs of Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), and those made by his brother Adrien Tournachon to illustrate the experiments of neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne. Holzapfel highlights an often overlooked fact about these pieces: in addition to their primary subjects, they prominently feature the presence of an observing expert. She successfully parlays that observation into the argument that the embodied vision of such scientific spectators mirrors Zola's [End Page 159]belief in "naturalism as an active, interpretive, and paradoxical negotiation between visual objectivity and subjectivity" (77). Chapter 3 opens with the last known image of Henrik Ibsen, an example of the popular photographic technique of stereography. Other artistic forms cited in the chapter include Pre-Raphaelite painting, spirit photography, and composition photography. These are read against the writings of philosophers J.W. von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. Holzapfel traces these influences on A Doll House, Ghosts, and The Wild Duck, forcefully arguing that Ibsen's oeuvre "discredits the notion that full disclosure of truth is either necessary or even plausible … through our own unreliable sense of vision" (114). With Chapter 4, Holzapfel returns to composite photography, highlighting the work of eugenicist Francis Galton, which she links to the photographic self-portraits of August Strindberg. The latter images, as well as Strindberg's plays, represent for Holzapfel "a process of layering sediments of the self upon one another to form a visual impression of a subject" (153), a point effectively made with analyses of The Father, Comrades, Miss Julie, and Creditors. The final tremor of Holzapfel's seismic argument is Chapter 5's treatment of Hauptmann's plays...

Piet Mondrian's Intuitive Neo-Plastic Art and Zen Notion of Mu-shin

Abstract Reviewing scholarly materials pertinent to prominent Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), one faces perplex interpretations of his essays based on Western thought such as Hegelism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and Theosophy. This research strives to shed a novel light on Mondrian's esoteric essays in respect to the pivotal notion of in Neo-Plastic art from antirational standpoint of Zen Buddhism. To this end, the concepts of inferior intellect and intuition, discussed in Mondrian's essays, are confronted with an anti-rational approach of Zen in disclosure of truth. Moreover this paper chronologically depicts the kinships between the pivotal Zen concept of mu-shin (no-mind) and Mondrian's notion of pure intuition as a universal vision which is further exemplified through three Neo-Plastic artworks representing three phases of Mondrian's artistic career. The results of this paper illuminate Mondrian's quasi-philosophical essays within the role of through ideology of Zen Buddhism.

“The weapon which wounds the rationalist kills the truth of revelation”: the Christian roots of “intellectual atheism” in nineteenth-century America

ABSTRACTNineteenth-century Protestant intellectuals broke from their Calvinist heritage by incorporating Arminian rationalism and conceding ultimate authority to science in the sphere of God’s natural revelation. Because of this commitment to science as an independent referee, both theologians and naturalists adopted the strategy of harmonizing biblical interpretation with empirical evidence, thereby allowing science to determine the meaning of Genesis 1. In the never-ending process of religious accommodation to science, the evangelical professoriate became imbued with an increasing naturalistic orientation – so much so that they actively assisted in the growth of scientific naturalism as the methodological norm and final criterion of all scientific inquiry.

Prevalence of Tobacco Smoking and Accuracy of Self-Reporting in Pregnant Women at a Public Hospital for Women and Children

Denial of smoking status by pregnant women presents a missed opportunity for referral to smoking cessation programmes that are shown to be effective in helping them quit smoking. A cross-sectional epidemiological survey was conducted to detect the true prevalence of active smoking pregnant patients and the accuracy of self-reporting, investigate the sociodemographic risk factors and test the knowledge of pregnant patients on adverse effects of smoking. This involved 972 antenatal patients of a maternity hospital where participants completed a sociodemographic data survey and answered a knowledge questionnaire. Urine cotinine testing was carried out after informed consent. The prevalence of active smokers was 5.2% (n = 50) with 3% (n = 29) being light smokers and 2.2% (n = 21) being heavy smokers. This was significantly higher than self-reported active smoking status of 3.7% (n = 36; P = 0.02). The Malay race, being aged less than 20 years and not having tertiary level qualifications independently increased the likelihood of being an active smoker. Knowledge of the adverse effects of smoking was generally good with a mean total score of 8.18 out of 10 but there were differences amongst the non-smokers, passive smokers, light smokers and active smokers (P = 0.012). While the prevalence of active smoking among pregnant women is low in Singapore compared to other countries, this study substantiated the unreliability of self-reporting of smoking status in the pregnant population which could complicate referral to smoking cessation programmes. The lower awareness of the harms of smoking during pregnancy among smokers highlights a potential area for improvement.

Popper’s Theory of World 3 and the Evolution of the Internet

While developing his theory of world 3, Popper rejects two claims made by Plato: first, that the inhabitants of world 3, ideas, are a source of ultimate explanation, a divine revelation of truth, and second, that these ideas are unchanging. I will rehabilitate the second claim. Man does not construct world 3 by creating his theories (as Popper claims), nor is it a source of ultimate truth (as Plato claims). Instead, world 3 is discovered by man, and it destroys some of his theories: destructive Platonism. I discuss the impact of the modified position on the Grundlagenstreit in mathematics, taking into account Gillies’s constructive Aristotelianism. I then turn to the philosophy of computers and discuss how destructive Platonism relates to computers and the Internet. In particular, I criticize Popper’s claim that computers are nothing but elaborate pens as too pessimistic and incautious, and the fashionable “singularity” theory (von Neumann, Ulam, Vinge, Kurzwell, Hawking) as too optimistic and at the same time too fatalistic. In my closing remarks, as an antidote against both views, I provide a more modest and reasonable (although, of course, very wild) speculation about the ultimate goal and meaning of life.

Preferences regarding disclosure of prognosis and end-of-life care: A survey of cancer patients with advanced disease in a lower-middle-income country

Background: Cancer patients’ preferences regarding disclosure of prognosis and end-of-life care remain under-reported from low- and middle-income countries where cancer poses an increasing demand on scarce healthcare resources. A better knowledge of these preferences can help in achievement of shared treatment goals. Aim: To survey preferences of adult cancer patients regarding disclosure of prognosis and end-of-life care Design: A multidimensional questionnaire was developed to survey consecutively sampled patients. A fifth of the participants completed a repeat survey 3 months later. Setting/participants: Adult patients at a specialist cancer center in Pakistan. Results: In total, 520 patients were surveyed initially (participation rate 98.6%) and 100 completed the repeat survey. Three in five respondents wanted a healthcare provider to give them detailed information about their prognosis and life expectancy. Those who wanted information withheld were significantly more likely to be female, to have a lower socioeconomic status, or to have lung cancer. Only two in five patients agreed that they wanted to die at home and more than 90% wanted all possible care till end-of-life. Yet, a little over half also agreed that they did not wish to be placed on a ventilator. In rank ordering preferences about end-of-life, respondents ranked “religious wellbeing” as the highest and “avoiding inappropriate prolongation of dying” as the lowest of six options. Conclusion: A majority of adult cancer patients surveyed in this study wanted a truthful disclosure about their disease prognosis and expressed a preference for hospital-based care at end-of-life. Healthcare providers should find ways to tailor prognostic information to patients’ expressed information needs.

The Serious Game: Towards a Hermeneutic Understanding of the Tarot

The images of tarot cards are rich in symbols which invite interpretation and speculation. In this paper I explain the predominant uses of the tarot cards. In parts of Europe the tarot is still played as a game; in Britain and the United States it is used for divination. Particular attention is given to the writings of Antoine Court de Gebelin and Jean-Baptiste Alliette, in the eighteenth century, as key turning points in the use of the cards from gaming to fortune-telling or cartomancy. As the practice of visual interpretation and the disclosure of truth are central to divination with the tarot, I refer to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer as an appropriate way of understanding the practice. I utilize Gadamer’s notions of play, festival and symbol to explain the relationship between gaming and reading the cards. From this I am able to formulate an understanding of cartomancy as a form of serious play, related to but differing from game play in the nature of its encounter with the symbol.

On The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson

On The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson A. J. Nickerson The Philosophy of Poetry. “Of” intimates something more than copular coexistence. This could be the systematic and propositional attempt to define what poetry is, subjecting poetry to philosophical investigation with its distinctive questions and processes of inquiry. As a literary critic, however, I heard the title The Philosophy of Poetry as an assertion of poetry’s discursive, cognitive value: it suggests there are varieties of philosophic thought, of which one might be the poetic organization of understanding. Between these inversions there are less exclusive (and less partisan) ways of imagining the relationship. The philosophy of poetry could be the attitude it assumes toward the world—its disinterested revelation of truth, or ruminating consideration of it, or resistance to its pressures. It could be the Aristotelian virtue of practical poetic commitment to propriety, discipline, and truthfulness. Or, following Heidegger, it could be poetry’s metaphysical work of measuring man’s existence in the world. One might expect (I did) this ambiguous coordination to be a strategic move to reconfigure the relation of philosophy and poetry through attention to the subtleties of their coexistence and interference. In practice, however, this volume is oriented away from the idiosyncratic particulars of poetry and toward establishing the philosophy of literature [End Page 309] as a subset of philosophy, using poetry to correct the earlier prose-heavy studies and so “attain the expansiveness and openness our friends in other areas of analytic aesthetics have already achieved.”1 The book presupposes analytic philosophy to be the basic and proper model of enquiry. Ten of the twelve essays are by members of philosophy faculties: John Gibson, Peter Lamarque, Ronald de Sousa, Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum, Sherri Irvin, Simon Blackburn, Anna Christina Soy Ribeiro, Roger Scruton, Alison Denham, and Richard Eldridge. Only Angela Leighton and Tzachi Zamir represent the literature department. They draw on a few philosophers (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Wollheim) and repeatedly cite other contributors (Richard Eldridge’s Beyond Representation: Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination, Peter Lamarque’s The Philosophy of Literature). This in-house—or rather, in-faculty—execution of a project that is necessarily cross-disciplinary is symptomatic of a low view of what literary criticism and literature might contribute to philosophy. This finds expression in the volume’s confessed reluctance to engage with poetry. De Sousa—at once pleased and saddened by his antipathy but typical in it—describes how he once “did passionately want to be a poet” but is now “only an occasional and always a highly prejudiced reader of poetry” (p. 37). Irvin in her essay on “unreadable poems” laments having to “consort with so many unfriendly poems” (p. 92). On the occasions when poems are included, choice seems circumscribed by a limited and popular acquaintance with poetry—Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Unsurprisingly, this inattention to poetry corresponds to a clumsiness in handling texts. This is evident in the apparently hasty editing of the volume, which is riddled with misspellings, lacunae, and ugly footnoting. The literary critic will also find it evident in some crude oversimplifications about literary history (Lamarque’s discussion of “supposed commonplaces about poetry”) and poetic effect (Prinz and Mandelbaum: “Rossetti uses rhyme and repetition to create a sense of rhythm” [p. 72]). This hampers the project of an analytic critique of poetry. Prinz and Mandelbaum’s essay “Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with Words” is a badly spliced and uneven composition. It is also desperately limited in its appreciation of poetic effect: we are told “the form of a poem is heightened,” “enjambment heightens the reader’s attention,” “bodily imagery … heightens the readers’ attention to sensation,” and “perceptual idioms … heighten the sensual feel” (pp. 79–81; my italics). This [End Page 310] heightening argues for an intensification of attention without observing the intricately differentiated phenomena, or explaining how or why these compositional aspects have this effect on our interest and engagement, or why they direct our embodied, subjective awareness of poetic experience. Consequently, this impoverished lexicon constrains the degree of refinement possible in aesthetic evaluation and, therefore, in the analytic study of poetry. At this point the literary...

Voluntary Disclosure Schemes for Offshore Tax Evasion: An Analysis

In recent years tax authorities worldwide have implemented voluntary disclosure schemes to recover tax on offshore investments. Such Schemes are characterized by the acquisition of non-audit information on offshore holdings, and a subsequent opportunity for affected taxpayers to make a voluntary disclosure. Accepted disclosures are subject to a discounted .ne rate, but verified under-disclosure attracts a higher penalty. We characterize the optimal Scheme and show that an optimal Scheme can generate a Pareto-improvement over the optimal auditing equilibrium without a Scheme, and can stimulate legitimate offshore investment activity. We show when a tax authority optimally gives incentives for truthful disclosure, and when it does not. The analysis yields practical design insights for policymakers.

Criticism and Contemplation: Steps toward an Agapeic Criticism

Criticism and ContemplationSteps toward an Agapeic Criticism Michael Martin (bio) In this article, I would like to focus on poetry as the site for exploring a criticism grounded in contemplation and this for several reasons. First of all, though a contemplative approach certainly applies to other domains as well, as a scholar of literature and as a poet, as both outside of and within poetry, I feel, despite my inadequacies, a certain obligation to speak on this subject. Secondly, poetry, because of the almost homeopathic concentration of language and energy it can possess, augmented by its concern with meaning and the disclosure of truth, is the paradigmatic art form for exploring a criticism of contemplation. Human beings to a significant degree associate their being and their selfhood with language. If someone fixes our cars or furnaces, for example, we feel grateful: if they correct our grammar, we feel offended or ashamed. If language is “the house of being,” as Heidegger claimed (following Hölderlin—a poet), then we should be able to account poetry “the house of the house of being.” My long relationship with poetry has convinced me, as Jean Wahl has argued, that an honest encounter with poetry reveals poetry by its very nature to be a kind of a spiritual exercise, wherein “Le mystériuex est ici tout près; et l’ici-tout-près est mystériuex”1 (“The mysterious is here very near, and the here-very-near is mysterious.”) [End Page 41] In a letter to Fr. Joseph-Marie Perrin written from Marseilles and dated May 15, 1942, the philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil writes of an intimate experience with a poem: There was a young English Catholic [at Solesmes] from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance—for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence—made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love.” I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.2 Surely, this is a startling confession, but her experience is not, I think, as rare as one might assume. Weil’s encounter with Herbert’s poem, though clearly possessing religious significance to her, bears more than a little resonance with what Richard Rorty, hardly a religious thinker, has called an initiatory event of “inspired criticism.” For Rorty, inspired criticism originates in the kind of experiences many of us have had: “the result of an encounter with an author, character, plot, stanza, line or archaic torso which has made a difference to the critic’s conception of who she is, what she is good for, what she wants to do with herself: an encounter which has rearranged her priorities and purposes.”3 Does anyone study the humanities seriously—certainly at what could be called a “professional level”—without having had such an experience? It [End Page 42] is difficult to imagine this not being the case, but, all too often, that initial enthusiasm and astonishment becomes disfigured as sarcasm, suspicion, even contempt, perhaps especially in the case of the “professionals.” Weil’s intimacy with Herbert’s poem, however, challenges such skepticism and puts its adherents on the defensive. Comfortable with a programmatic and doctrinaire naturalism with roots in the Enlightenment, many would dismiss her as deluded, regressed, clinging to infantile fantasies, narcissistic, or worse. Even in her sensitive, sympathetic documentary, An Encounter with Simone...

Injury, Pain, and Change in War and Peace: The Cases of Nikolai Rostov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky

Physical pain plays an important but unusual role in the War and Peace. In the pre‐twentieth century literary landmarks in which physical pain figures prominently, pain is closely linked to the idea of justice. In Dante, it is condign justice; in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Dostoevsky, injustice that threatens the national or world order. In Tolstoy, by contrast, pain is much more closely associated with revelation, transformation, and truth. We can see this plainly in the changes that take place, through pain, in the lives of two of the male protagonists, Nikolai Rostov and Andrei Bolkonsky. Pain of course also plays a significant role in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, but I have chosen to focus, at least here, on War and Peace, because War and Peace presents the relation between pain, revelation, and truth in greater detail, over a much longer period of time, and in radically dissimilar characters. What at first Nikolai and Andrei seem to have in common is that their physical pain stems directly from their battle injuries. Nikolai is injured at Schöngrabern in 1805; and Andrei at Austerlitz in 1805 and again at Borodino in 1812. But there are also surprising similarities regarding the effects of pain in their lives, similarities that need to be examined–as well, of course, as dramatic differences–if we are to achieve a better understanding of Tolstoy's use of physical pain as a transformative catalyst. By analyzing Nikolai's and especially Andrei's traumatic injuries and both their short and long‐term effects, I hope to show how Tolstoy employs the shock of excruciating physical pain as a means of leading two of his male protagonists toward spiritual transformation and the revelation of truth.

A Song of Great Order

Abstract The real is perhaps the most ambiguous term in critical discourse, and has come to represent a host of investigations into the limit of language as an expressive vehicle in the face of an immaculate silence. As presented in McCarthy's novel, the real in fact works beyond such theological understandings to move through and past Lacanian models and into aesthetic theories of truth and the nature of the artwork. The writings of Alain Badiou allow us to grasp more concretely the deployment of the real in The Crossing, specifically Badiou's understanding of the dialectic in the manufacture of meaning and the role of the poetic enunciation in relationship to the revelation of truth. A close reading of the key structuring element of The Crossing, the Mexican folksong of the corrido, reveals how an artistic act can create the world in which it is performed, and how the resulting work of art may be the only thing, in the end, that can be called real.

Impact of patients with esophageal cancer knowing diagnosis on the mental health of their children

Objective To explore the impact of patients with esophageal cancer knowing diagnosis on the mental health of their children and investigate the factors. Methods 107 family carriers whose parent diagnosed esophageal cancer in General Hospital of Jinan Command were interviewed. Respondents were categorized into two groups: one group was those whose parents knew their diagnosis(Group A, n=45)and the other group was those whose parents did not know(Group B, n=62). The Chinese version of Self-reporting Inventory(SCL-90) was used. Results The scores of 107 children of esophageal cancer patients in depression(1.62±0.30), anxiety(1.78±0.34) and hostility (1.93±0.47) were higher than national norms (P<0.01). Compared with group A, group B showed a significant higher degree of anxiety((1.89±0.33) vs (1.62±0.33), P<0.01). In multiple regression analysis, age and the knowledge of esophageal cancer diagnosis had statistically significant difference(P<0.05). Conclusion Patients' knowledge of the esophageal cancer diagnosis contribute to relieving family carers' symptoms of anxiety. Key words: Esophageal cancer; Patients' children; Mental health; Truth disclosure

"Normalizing" Intersex Didn't Feel Normal or Honest to Me.

“Normalizing” Intersex Didn’t Feel Normal or Honest to Me. Karen A. Walsh I am an intersex woman with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). My 57–year history with this has its own trajectory—mostly driven by medical events, and how I and my parents reacted. Most of my treatment by physicians has not been positive. It didn’t make me “normal” at all. I was born normal and didn’t require medical interventions. And by the way, I’ve never been confused about who or what I am. Truthful disclosure didn’t come to me about my biology and what was done to me as an infant until I was 33, when I forced the issue by removing my medical records from my endocrinologist’s office. I learned that there was never full disclosure to my [End Page 119] parents either, and therefore there was no informed consent for the “corrective” surgeries performed on me as an infant. My parents were only told that their little girl would get cancer and would not have a normal development as a girl unless her “deformed ovaries” were removed, and that they should never discuss these problems with me. Thus, after having presented with an inguinal hernia and having exploratory surgery at age 16 months, my intra–abdominal testes were removed in a second surgery two months later. I was pronounced a “male pseudohermaphrodite,” a diagnosis that was shared neither with my parents nor with me. Years later, I discovered an article my surgeon published in 1960 in the Delaware Medical Journal about me and another intersex person he operated on (whom he labeled a “true hermaphrodite”). The article gives a very detailed pathology report of my gonads, but only two sentences regarding my welfare and the rationale for performing those surgeries. Dr. J. F. Kustrup wrote in this article, “These [two cases] emphasize the need for early diagnosis and treatment in order to avoid the possibility of malignant change and to permit these individuals to follow a normal psychosexual pattern.” And: “Hermaphroditism and pseudohermaphroditism are conditions in which early diagnosis and treatment are essential to avoid malignant degeneration and to allow the child some chance toward normal pyschic [sic] development.” I was grateful to find this article because it revealed the unfounded assumptions underpinning the recommendations for treatment, much of which continues today. Worse even than the sort of social prejudice that shapes treatment is the absence of evidence for what doctors treat as “necessary” interventions. For my syndrome, CAIS, there never was—and still is not—data to support the cancer scare, or the opinion that I’d be confused and not have a normal life. From about the age of four, I can remember being different and being stonewalled by my doctor and prevented by my parents from talking about it. The feelings and fears I tried to express were shushed away, and I could tell that my questions were upsetting everyone. Even if I had wanted to be complicit with their lame diversions and nonsensical explanations, the massive abdominal scars were there as a daily reminder and hinted at a very different story. The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions Growing up, I was treated like a fascinoma and a lab rat at a major teaching hospital on the East Coast. All I learned from those doctors as a young kid was what it feels like to be ogled, photographed and probed by a roomful of white–coated male doctors. Dissociation made itself my friend, and helped me to cope through the annual genital and anal exams and probing. I thought I was a freak and I felt completely powerless to protect myself from them and their “care”. At my annual appointment at age 12, with my mom present, three doctors told me I was infertile. Learning that I couldn’t have kids really saddened and shocked me, but there was no opportunity to talk about my feelings—either that day, or any time afterward. I was told to stop crying. I remember them telling me that there was no one else like me and that this was a random genetic anomaly, thereby reinforcing the freakishness...

Why did they do that?: the methodology of reasons for action

‘Why did they do that?’ is one of the most common questions in International Relations. However, we cannot access other people’s reasons for action the same way that we perceive our own; we cannot introspect the reasons of other actors. This paper provides a unifying framework that delineates different types of knowledge claims regarding reason attribution. There are three possible methodological responses: (1) assume a possible reason and explain behavior in terms of that reason; (2) avoid the direct attribution of reason to individuals and locate explanatory leverage at an analytical level beyond the individual actor reason; and (3) use empirical evidence to adjudicate between possible reasons. Excessive skepticism of evidence of reasons lessens our understanding of the causes of action. When using empirical evidence, contrary to existing arguments, the paper shows that private settings do not systematically favor the true revelation of reasons. The paper also proposes a general principle, consilience, that allows evaluation of empirical claims of reason attribution that subsumes several existing methodological considerations, organizes them, and gives a consistent means of choosing between alternative reason attributions.

&lt;b&gt;The &lt;i&gt;Opus Dei&lt;/i&gt; of violence in Augusto Matraga

The experiences experienced by men in modernity transform literary narratives, thematically and formally, establishing the aim to use allegory as an explanatory stage of that new reality. In the book The Origin of German Tragic Drama, by Walter Benjamin, he conceives allegory as the revelation of a hidden truth that does not represent things just as they are, but provides a version of how they were or might have been. As a reflection of the principles implied in that reading, this paper takes Benjamin's allegory as an analytical category aiming at identifying the representation of violence in the short story A hora e a vez de Augusto Matraga (The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga), by Guimaraes Rosa. Our analysis opens a dialogue with the dialectical perspective, in which social-historical conditioning factors contribute to understand Minas Gerais backlands, whose ethos supplies a perception of the world incorporated by Guimaraes Rosas' poetics, widening the view of a violent and enchanting world.

Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism

Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism Martine Antle (bio) Despite the numerous exchanges and multiple echoes between dada, surrealism and other cultures, European surrealism rarely took hold abroad, whether in the diasporas or in the United States. A fundamental question posed in 1997 by Henri Béhar is still relevant today: did surrealism support non-European cultures or was it simply inspired by them in a universal, non-culturally specific way?1 A first approach to answering this question consists in revisiting the political views held by André Breton and other members of the surrealist group, including those who, like Breton, were first involved with dada. There is no doubt that Breton and other surrealists consistently spoke out against colonization and oppression. Even though it was absent from the first two “Manifestoes of Surrealism,” criticism of colonialism truly marked the history of the movement. The surrealists took strong positions against colonial domination, particularly by France, with regard to a variety of former colonies that gained independence over the course of the twentieth century, including Indochina, Algeria, Haiti and Martinique, and also Cuba. But what happened when surrealism found itself confronted with other cultures? Did surrealism truly engage with those cultures? What did it make of the range of cultural particularities and political realities the surrealists encountered in their travels? When compared with recent studies on post-colonialism, surrealism’s ideological position loses moral power because it remained essentially self-involved and disengaged with the specific struggles and needs of the people they had hoped to inspire. The greatest impact their interactions with distant cultures had was on themselves; what they sought most was confirmation of their own ideas and aesthetic ideals, which they often found more readily abroad than at home. For despite their faith in their ideology of liberation and their immense and openhearted fascination with other cultures, the surrealists often saw those cultures as exotic objects rather than collectives of real human beings with whom they might productively enter into true dialogue. For example, Mexico struck Breton as magical and a place of true revelation because it appeared to him as an idyllic version of a place in the world that he had previously only imagined. Mexico confirmed Breton’s own vision of surreality. It was in pursuit of this vision that he had traveled [End Page 116] there. Unfortunately the surrealists rarely heard the writings and sentiments coming from the cultures they admired fully, except insofar as those writings and sentiments confirmed their own ideas. In terms of surrealist production, the corpus of texts dedicated to territories outside of Europe remains relatively meager. Breton’s journeys to Prague, Haiti, or Mexico were motivated primarily by political exile, meetings, conferences, or exhibitions, which he attended with missionary zeal and the intention of bringing the surrealist world to the uninitiated. Another case in point— Antonin Artaud’s initiatory voyage to Mexico was planned as a voyage of spiritual discovery for himself and his search for a new “truth” to be used for the benefit of his own psychic growth and then brought back to France for the purpose of transforming his own culture rather than for the purpose of staying and engaging more fully with Mexican culture, the way fellow surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo did.2 These two friends developed their own strain of surrealism while living in Mexico and engaged fully with a community that was inclusive of Mexican artists and writers in addition to their own ex-patriot circle of friends. Their work flourished well beyond the fleeting influence that Breton exercised around the time of the international exhibition of surrealism in Mexico City in 1940. Where surrealism had a definite impact was on poetry and art produced by writers and artists in other countries, as examples of cross-fertilization and cultural exchange confirm. But these exchanges were predominantly artistic and not political and did not find their way into the movement’s representative political texts. As a result, the internationalization of the movement and its aftermath abroad raises once again the question of “importation” of a European movement into a foreign land. And we also have to take into account the obvious linguistic...