This issue features a number of papers, reviews, and letters on subjectivity, objectivity, relativism, positivism, constructivism, reality, metaphor, postmodernism, and other philosophical topics as they relate to analysts and the clinical situation. By way of introduction I offer the following quotes, brought to my attention by Michael Ruse's Mystery of Mysteries (Harvard University Press, 1999).

“There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced upon him by that natural world. They are the expression of a rational world order” (Max Planck).

“Both science and baseball, then, are mixtures of adventuresome inventiveness and reliance on established norms and mechanisms of validation, and the facts yielded by both will be social constructions and be real” (Stanley Fish, New York Times, May 21, 1996).

Who is right? the rabbi is asked.