This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

Defamation is different from many of the other torts, not only because it contains concepts that do not arise elsewhere, but also because in no other tort do the defences play such a significant role in litigation. As a figure in the chapter illustrates, the elements of the tort set a wide circle of protection that shields a person’s private interest in their reputation –but this protection is cut down to a large extent by the defences, most of which reflect the importance of a countervailing public interest in free communication of information and opinion. To succeed in a defamation action, the plaintiff must be able to bring their case into the central zone (shown in the figure), but note that the balance between the two zones has varied over time.

A hallmark of wise deliberative spaces is their commitment to truth-seeking, in contrast to “post-truth” contexts where emotional appeals and personal beliefs are more important than objective facts. Chapter 5 explores how post-truth thinking has been fueled by cognitive elites across the political spectrum and traces its roots to postmodernist ideas. The chapter reviews philosophical definitions of truth, contrasting idealist and coherentist views with realist theories, specifically correspondence, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. It draws on Hilary Putnam’s concept of natural realism to argue that objective truths do exist – depending on the domain of inquiry – but only if we distinguish between what is true and what is merely believed to be true. Postpositivism supports this by recognizing an external reality while acknowledging that our knowledge is fallible and evolving. Biases, though inevitable, can be countered through reflexive and communal inquiry. Ultimately, the chapter argues that wisdom lies in understanding the nature of different kinds of inquiry – scientific, moral, or otherwise – without falling into the trap of relativism.

Despite some notable similarities between the scientific realisms of Sellars and Peirce (such as both being anti-representationalist and future-directed), in his mature work Science and Metaphysics, Sellars explicitly critiqued Peirce’s account of truth as lacking “an intelligible foundation” (SM: vii). In this paper, I explore Sellars’ proposed remedy to Peirce’s purported lack, in his complex and enigmatic account of picturing – a non-discursive ‘mapping’ of the world. I argue that although Sellars’ development of this idea is largely sound, much of what he charges Peirce’s philosophy with missing is actually present there. By means of his semiotic icon/index/symbol distinction, Peirce manages to develop a philosophy of language which effectively coordinates the real order and the order of signification within the very structure of the proposition as he understands it, by contrast to Sellars’ claim that the two orders are merely connected by ‘analogy’. I also argue that in between Sellars’ ambitious account of veridicality, which appears to anticipate a form of scientific self-mensuration, and the dismissive ‘anti-truth’ quietism of neopragmatists such as Rorty, Peirce’s “contrite fallibilism” (Peirce CP 1.14) charts a wise middle path.

This chapter examines how achievement books produced by Egyptian state institutions have narrated and re-narrated the 1952 revolution. These books were centrally published by the Information Department, a crucial yet seldom studied organ in the emerging Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, as well as public relations units across different ministries. After a brief institutional history of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance as a whole, in which I demonstrate how ‘culture’ and ‘media’ were originally intertwined in administrative terms, I argue that the state’s achievements were narrated according to a changing conception of the revolution between 1954 and 1970. This rhetoric cemented a distinctive version of history among Egyptian bureaucrats, in which long lists of achievements came to articulate the bureaucratic corps’ contributions to the revolution. Moreover, it aimed to counter colonial propaganda via a systematic presentation of ‘the true Egypt’ in numerous European languages. In short, achievement books recorded, disseminated, and embodied the revolution’s accomplishments for a domestic and an international audience.

This chapter explores the role of Human Impact Units (Hu) and regenerative authentication credits in transforming environmental, social, and governance (ESG) governance into a more transparent and equitable knowledge commons. The authors argue that current ESG valuation models, particularly those rooted in carbon-centric methodologies, fail to capture the full spectrum of ESG impacts and often lead to “greenwashing.” By shifting the focus to noncarbon-based valuation mechanisms, such as the Hu and RACs frameworks, the chapter demonstrates how ESG efforts can be more accurately monetized, fostering greater trust and transparency in ESG claims. The authors build the theoretical foundation by proposing the concept of “ESG as knowledge commons” for managing environmental commons, and suggest that “truth” serves as the shared resource, documented through blockchain. Specifically, RACs utilize a blockchain-based framework to ensure data permanence and immutability while allowing for controlled transparency. This research underscores the permanence of truth, enabled by the network’s immutability. Overall, RACs offer an alternative governance model to traditional ESG approaches, leveraging the polycentric nature of blockchain networks to effectively address the uncertainty inherent in the ESG industry.

Lane argues that Charles Peirce’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. Some participants in those debates view an early embryo as numerically identical to, and as having the same moral status as, the adult to which it gives rise; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. Others argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. Lane argues that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are Peirce’s synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept – a linguistic mirage – most would argue there’s something of importance there, but what is it? Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth – as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 14 – at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

Howat considers whether appeals to truth should play a role in political discourse. He examines two kinds of response: that of Richard Rorty and his followers, and of “New Pragmatists” like Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse. Rorty rejected the idea of objective truth and hailed as “anti-authoritarian” the sort of pragmatism that sets that concept aside. Howat notes some overlap between Rorty’s position and that of Hannah Arendt, who didn’t reject the idea of truth itself but still argued against the use of that idea in political contexts. Unlike Rorty or Arendt, the New Pragmatists hold that the principal goal of political discourse is not agreement but rather a view that can withstand critical scrutiny – and according to the New Pragmatists, such a view can qualify as true. While tentatively aligning himself with the New Pragmatists and against Rorty, Howat argues that not all political discourse has truth as its aim. He also argues that it is unclear whether the New Pragmatist account of democracy, truth, and political discourse has the resources to deal adequately with the ways in which “our bounded rationality” allows us to be exploited.

Dante’s two reports of his looks back to earth frame this section. After the first, Dante has a vision of Christ himself.Despite this theophany, Dante must undergo an examination of his Christianity, testing him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.The eager “bachelor” answers the masters’ queries with definitions memorized from authoritative texts.The test, however, exceeds rote memorization.The question of the texts’ truth, which concern the most significant matter of our happiness, moves the participants to inquire more deeply.

Dante rethinks the Christian virtues as he rethought the sins in Purgatorio.His reassessment reconsiders Adam, the figure most intimately connected with the meaning of Scripture’s supremacy, namely, its discouragement of philosophic inquiry. Through this conversation, Dante reinterprets the text that originates the faith in which he’s tested. He recurs to that origin to direct it onto an alternative path, one that encourages rather than prohibits the philosophic life.

This alternative way of life requires an alternative divinity. In this realm of the fixed stars, to which he traces his origins as man and poet, Dante undertakes the ultimate poetic act, that of theopoiesis. Dante’s vision of Christ, he writes, prepared him to see Beatrice.

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

This chapter shows how Laura Riding’s poetry was responding to a now-unrecognisable scientific regime of reading that prioritised exactitude over ambiguity. For her, this regime was brought about by the emergence of a new kind of literary critic, one she scathingly referred to as a bureaucratic ‘expert’. In response, her verse aimed to develop a superior form of exactitude, which she hoped would provide a poetics of literal truth. However, this chapter suggests that if Riding’s poetry does evince a truth-content, then it is not in its supposed exactitude but rather in how its artifice demonstrates a thinking precisely in excess of the forms of rational knowing that sought to determine it. In Riding’s own poetry – and this despite her best intentions – it is precisely what she would call its graphic and sonorous ‘freakishness’ that displayed the truth-content of that which scientific modernity consigned to the unknowable. This chapter thus reads Riding as an unchosen path for the history of poetics, one devoted to thinking about poetry’s singular truth-content in an era devoted to scientific specialisation and professionalisation.

The notion of truth is a powerful one within transitional justice, and truth-telling and truth-seeking are considered to be a necessary part of any justice pursuit. Also in the US, official government actors are creating truth commissions (or truth commission-like processes) in order to acknowledge and address a wide range of violent and discriminatory contexts, both historical and present-day. This chapter explores two such truth commissions operating at the sub-national level, namely in the states of Maryland and California. Drawing from participatory scholarship, the chapter evaluates these examples and highlights how current and future truth processes can better conceptualise and implement victim participation in order to have deeper engagement and impact with affected communities. Examining these efforts around agency and empowerment can shed light on broader developments around formalised participation, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the second generation of victim engagement in transitional justice practices in the US.

Chapter 6 concerns the contentious issue of the role of the concept of life in the Logic and its consistency with the artifact-centered conception of teleology defended in chapter 5. There is a common tendency in the literature to think that the Life chapter implicitly imports references to the biological domain in the Logic itself. It is here argued instead that Hegel’s Life chapter must be read in “topic-neutral” terms: in a way that requires application neither to the natural or cultural domains. Once it is read in this neutral way, we can see that “logical life” is simply the notion of a self-determining purpose. However, the concept of life as developed by Hegel is not at all opposed to the artifactual domain; this is especially because the social and cultural domain (social ontology) give us prime examples of “living artifacts,” the kind of artifacts that can be based in a process guided by thought.

Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

Stephen Engstrom argues that judgments that amount to knowledge constitute the end of the faculty of understanding. This implies that true judgments and false judgments are not on par in relation to the attainment of this end. False judgments are incomplete realizations of the understanding whose explanation requires reference to a factor that prevents it from attaining its end. Engstrom takes this to show that truth is essential to judgment (and belongs to its form) whereas falsity is not. This is reflected in our original, a priori understanding of judgment, according to which the capacity to judge is the capacity to know (rather than the capacity, say, to judge either truly or falsely). In an appendix, Engstrom relates this account to the notion of objective validity.

This chapter lays out two key tasks in reading Scripture that Augustine identifies in the Confessions, and especially in his exegesis of Genesis: “the task of grasping meaning” and “the task of grasping truth.” The first task is that of discerning authorial intention; the second is that of “seeing for oneself that what the author is saying is in fact the case.” The task of grasping meaning is difficult in part because of the peculiar character of the Scriptures; they are both accessible to all, using ordinary language (which is open to misinterpretation), and yet full of profundities that only the wisest readers can come to appreciate. It is also difficult because we cannot really know what is in another person’s mind; any judgments about authorial intention are provisional at best, and only pride would claim to have identified the uniquely correct interpretation. The task of grasping truth is likewise difficult. When it comes to intelligible realities, Truth speaks inwardly, not through any text, even that of Scripture. When it comes to historical realities, including the central truths about the life of the Incarnate Word, we cannot have knowledge in the fullest sense.