ABSTRACT Focused upon Descartes’ writings and letters, this paper considers the exponentially-charged relationship between sadness, melancholy, doubt and philosophical inquiry. The first sections examine the relation between sadness in the Cartesian corpus and melancholy as a traditional pathological classification, with both set against a larger seventeenth century intellectual discourse. The letters exchanged between the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the Palatine and Descartes between 1643 and 1649, that is, just prior to the death of the philosopher in 1650, reveal the (...) central paradigm of this particular relationship between sadness and melancholy. The call to use philosophy as a cure against sadness also enters consideration, with the theatrical, artificial nature of the philosophical cure presented as essential not only to Descartes’ relation to sadness, but also to philosophical method in general. The moral aspect of the establishment of mental habits and their emendation by philosophy hence yields central insights into the larger Cartesian project, here viewed as essentially premised upon a medical vocation. (shrink)

_Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France_ is a two-volume work that documents the French reception of G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling from 1801 to 1848. It shows that the story of the "French Hegel" didn't begin with Wahl and Kojève by giving readers a solid understanding of the various ways in which German Idealism impacted nineteenth-century French philosophy, as well as providing the first ever English-language translations of excerpts from the most important philosophical texts of (...) the era. Inside volume two, readers will find a series of scholarly studies to help them get to grips with this neglected field in the history of ideas. The contributors are world-leading and emerging experts from Europe, UK, and North America. They highlight the stakes and trace the pathways of this reception for French and German thought during the period, including the ways in which French philosophers of the period took up the debates and concepts of German Idealism, transformed them or rejected them. In this way, the volume aims to redress the serious neglect of early nineteenth-century French thought in English-language scholarship and, in so doing, goes beyond a nation-based narrative of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

_Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France_ is a two-volume work that documents the French reception of G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling from 1801 to 1848. It shows that the story of the "French Hegel" didn't begin with Wahl and Kojève by giving readers a solid understanding of the various ways in which German Idealism impacted nineteenth-century French philosophy, as well as providing the first ever English-language translations of excerpts from the most important philosophical texts of (...) the era. Inside volume one, readers will find a number of interpretative frameworks to help them get to grips with this neglected field in the history of ideas. In addition to excerpted translations and a narrative of Hegel’s and Schelling’s fate in France during the early nineteenth century, this volume includes an introduction on transnational reception history, as well as an analytical catalogue of the translations of their work produced in French at this time, of the publications which appropriated or interrogated their philosophical legacy, and of the journals, institutional structures and other mechanisms of dissemination that brought Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy into France. The book thus details the ways in which French philosophers of the period took up the debates and concepts of German Idealism, transformed them or rejected them. In this way, it aims to contribute to a reversal of the serious neglect of early nineteenth-century French thought in English-language scholarship and, in so doing, goes beyond a nation-based narrative of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the (...) mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1. (shrink)

The stability theory of first order theories was initiated by Saharon Shelah in 1969. The classification of abstract elementary classes was initiated by Shelah, too. In several papers, he introduced non-forking relations. Later, Shelah [17, II] introduced the good non-forking frame, an axiomatization of the non-forking notion.We improve results of Shelah on good non-forking frames, mainly by weakening the stability hypothesis in several important theorems, replacing it by the almost λ-stability hypothesis: The number of types over a model of cardinality (...) λ is at most λ+.We present conditions on Kλ, that imply the existence of a model in Kλ+n for all n. We do this by providing sufficiently strong conditions on Kλ, that they are inherited by a properly chosen subclass of Kλ+. What are these conditions? We assume that there is a ‘non-forking’ relation which satisfies the properties of the non-forking relation on superstable first order theories. Note that here we deal with models of a fixed cardinality, λ.While in Shelah [17, II] we assume stability in λ, so we can use brimmed models, here we assume almost stability only, but we add an assumption: The conjugation property.In the context of elementary classes, the superstability assumption gives the existence of types with well-defined dimension and the ω-stability assumption gives the existence and uniqueness of models prime over sets. In our context, the local character assumption is an analog to superstability and the density of the class of uniqueness triples with respect to the relation ≼bs is the analog to ω-stability. (shrink)

This field study aims to explore the effect of the forced separation between Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and Palestinians living in the West Bank on their perceptions of collective narratives (Sagy et al. in Am J Orthopsychiatry 72(1): 26–38, 2002) and their identity strategies (Berry in Nebraska symposium on motivation, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990; Tajfel in Human groups and social categories, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981). Two questionnaires, based on the theoretical categories and contents revealed in focus (...) groups, were administered to wide ranging samples, comprised of 1,104 Palestinians who are Israeli citizens (622 females), and 948 Palestinians (466 females) living in the West Bank, aged 18 and up. The results indicate differences between the two Palestinian groups: Palestinians living in the West Bank significantly tended to endorse integration and blamed Israel for the separation, but also endorsed separation and social competition with the other Palestinian group, in comparison to the Palestinians living in Israel. The latter exhibited stronger tendencies to preserve their in-group collective narratives compared to the West Bank Palestinians. The older members of both groups perceived the intergroup relations in a more positive way. The results are mainly interpreted according to the social identity theory and the complex situation of living “on both sides of the fence”. (shrink)

In his famous lecture on Kant's essay 'An Answer to the Question What is Enlightenment' Foucault distinguished between two traditions in modern philosophy coming out of Kant's work: 'an analytic of truth' and 'an ontology of present reality [ actualité ]' or 'a genealogy of ourselves'. The paper presents this distinction as a fruitful displacement of the distinction between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy,which gives the latter precise cultural and philosophical meaning. The paper clarifies the distinction and argues that almost without (...) exception, analytic philosophers are not interested -in their capacity as philosophers - in interpreting and understanding their historical present. Some possible reasons and some possible consequences of this lack of interest are examined briefly. Within the continental tradition itself, two major contemporary forms of 'an ontology of present reality' are distinguished, one exemplified by Habermas and the other by Foucault. The difference between these two forms of 'taking aim at the heart of the present' (to use Habermas' phrase) is explicated as a difference between distinct genres of critical discourse, or forms of critique. The difference is presented in respect to two major aspects: historical time and historicity, and critique's mode of engagement with 'an analytic of truth'. The last point, namely the presence of a crucial analytic moment in the philosophical interpretation of present reality, suggests a possible modification of the initial distinction between the two philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's philosophy is the description of the structure and behavior of human consciousness. Adi Shmüeli reconstructs that philosophy by showing that it always reflects the structure in question, and thus provides a useful key to Kierkegaard's work. Mr. Shmüeli approaches his task by analyzing first the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of life as successive steps in the gradual awakening of consciousness. He then describes the alienation of consciousness, of which Kierkegaard speaks in all his works, and discusses Kierkegaard's theory (...) of indirect communication, philosophical action whose aim is to awaken consciousness in order to rescue it from alienation. Studying Kierkegaard's observations on Christianity as indirect communication, Professor Shmüeli deals also with his reflections on the philosophical problem of truth. His concluding chapter discusses the temporality and historicity of human consciousness. Quotations, taken primarily from accessible English translations, are generously provided to put the reader in direct contact with Kierkegaard's own words. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The notion $J$ is independent in $(M,M_0,N)$ was established by Shelah, for an AEC (abstract elementary class) which is stable in some cardinal $\lambda$ and has a non-forking relation, satisfying the good $\lambda$-frame axioms and some additional hypotheses. Shelah uses independence to define dimension. Here, we show the connection between the continuity property and dimension: if a non-forking satisfies natural conditions and the continuity property, then the dimension is well-behaved. As a corollary, we weaken the stability hypothesis and two additional (...) hypotheses, that appear in Shelah's theorem. (shrink)

A critical edition of "Tahdhīb Al-Akhlāq", a treatise ascribed to the Jacobite theologian, logician, and translator in Abbasid period, Yahya ibn Adi.

A number of recently published studies by reformist-minded Muslim scholars have both questioned the normative nature of and emphasized the need to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and interpretational models governing traditional Islamic legal theories and ethics. As part of this process they have emphasized the need to develop novel Islamic hermeneutics. One major element in this emergence of novel Islamic hermeneutics is the production of an increased number of what I term ‘gender equality affirmative scholarship on Islam’. What (...) is particularly interesting, if not intriguing, from the perspective of the author of this article is that the scholarship on gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam is theorized by reformist-minded Muslim male scholars at historically unprecedented levels which is what this study seeks to highlight. This article examines the arguments employed by three prominent contemporary Muslim male reformist scholars, both Shī’ī and Sunnī, in developing gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam – Nasr Abu Zayd, Mohsen Kadivar, and Khaled Abou El Fadl. The focus on male scholars in this article is intentional and seeks to highlight the most fundamental point and indeed the raison d’être behind it, namely to underscore the historically unprecedented support Muslim male scholars are providing to the development of feminist interpretations of Islam. (shrink)

Traditionally dated from the 8th to the 14th century, historians generally agree on the period of the golden age of Islamic civilization. They count that the keys to this civilizational achievement laid on the flourishing educational institutions, scientific findings, and the births of influential Muslim scholars. This article tries to reframe the significance of education in the creation of Islamic golden age and offer a brief reminder to the importance of education for contemporary Muslim societies. It is a bibliographical study (...) for the materials for the discussion are taken from books, journal articles, and other written sources related to the topic. The collected data were then analyzed by content analysis. This article argues that the state policies on education is the key for the past Muslim golden age. Scientific culture ranging from namely research tradition, translation tradition, reading tradition to scientific habitus are essential in the making of Muslim golden age. This historical records reserves as a reminder for contemporary Muslim to reestablish the past golden age that lies on the reformation of educational system. (shrink)

Changes in the US food system and an interest in changing dietary habits among youth have impelled numerous schools and communities to develop programs such as community gardens. Youth community gardens have the potential to positively influence dietary behaviors and enhance environmental awareness and appreciation. However, actual data supporting youth gardening and its influence are limited. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of community gardens on youth dietary behaviors, values and beliefs, and cooking and gardening behaviors. (...) Focus groups were conducted with inner-city youth living in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota and compared those involved in a youth garden program with those uninvolved in order to investigate whether the gardening program influenced their habits, beliefs, and values. Findings indicate that youth garden program participants were more willing to eat nutritious food and try ethnic and unfamiliar food than those not in the program. Additionally, it was apparent that garden participants had a stronger appreciation for other individuals and cultures and were more likely to cook and garden on their own than youth not involved in a garden program. The findings suggest that garden programs positively impact youth garden habits, food choice, social skills, nutrition knowledge, and cooking skills. (shrink)

The question of what role sex plays in evolution is still open despite decades of research. It has often been assumed that sex should facilitate the increase in fitness. Hence, the fact that it may break down highly favorable genetic combinations has been seen as a problem. Here, we consider an alternative approach. We define a measure that represents the ability of alleles to perform well across different combinations and, using numerical iterations within a classical population-genetic framework, show that selection (...) in the presence of sex favors this ability in a highly robust manner. We also show that the mechanism responsible for this effect has been out of the purview of previous theory, because it operates during the evolutionary transient, and that the breaking down of favorable genetic combinations is an integral part of it. Implications of these results and more to evolutionary theory are discussed. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s road to skepticism differed from that of many skeptics who preceded him. His skepticism did not arise from the view that it is impossible to bridge the gap between subjective impressions and the objective world. Comparison with Hume will serve to clarify this point. Hume’s skepticism was based on several basic assumptions amongst which of central importance was the assumption that the only immediate data of consciousness are "impressions and ideas." He was led to skepticism by his belief that (...) the transition from the realm of subjective impressions to an objective ordered world of physical substances could not be rationally justified. Thus, when in his skeptical frame of mind, Hume would say that knowledge of the material world is unattainable. However, he never doubted that we know our own here and now impressions, for he assumed that they are directly given to consciousness. (shrink)

The essay proposes an unexpected alliance between two of the figures assembled in the impressive intellectual constellation Benhabib presents in her new book: Albert O. Hirschman and Judith Butler. Hirschman’s model of ‘exit, voice, loyalty’ is used to interpret and justify the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

Among those who know Yehuda's work, the term “two-tier thinking” is usually associated with a problematic relativist position. But “two-tier thinking” is not a name for a philosophical argument; it is best understood, I think, as a term designating certain conditions of knowledge: universal, or modern, or perhaps only postmodern conditions, but in any case, they are generalizations derived from anthropological and psychological observations on matters of facts. This is how things actually work in the sphere of knowledge: Western intellectuals (...) and scientists tend to acknowledge that their truth claims and certainly their normative claims are incompatible with other claims that stem from other belief systems, frameworks of thought or genres of discourses, and there is no final, impartial instance of judgment to adjudicate between the incompatible claims and the conflicting systems. Lack of “final,” impartial judgment does not hinder people from taking their truth claims seriously and acting as realists within the world constituted by their particular belief systems — tier 1. But when they come to reflect upon it, as some of them do, sometimes, they acknowledge the context-dependence of this realism and the fact that there is no way to make good on its claim to universality; theirs, they know, is but one particular “belief system,” or “genre of discourse,” among many. (shrink)

One of the most significant, incontestable, and relatively ignored aspects of modernity is the new role states play as generators and facilitators of disasters, on the one hand, and as authors — or at least facilitators, sponsors, and coordinators — of survival and relief operations, on the other hand. The relation of the modern state to disaster has played an important role in the emergence of the state as a "totalizing totality" and in the constitution of its image as a (...) historical subject. This Article argues that state’s relation to disaster and its unfolding consequences has developed in two opposite directions that should be distinguished carefully. In line with these two opposite relations to disaster, I suggest a theoretical distinction between two state formations: a providential state and a catastrophic state. This distinction is based on Agamben’s concept of "bare life," which a sovereign may forsake by declaring an exception but which it may also save by taking extraordinary measures of protection or relief. The Article examines two aspects of the difference between the two state formations. From a formal point of view, it distinguishes and discusses two different notions of sovereignty, its authority, foundation, and legitimacy, along with two different understandings of the subjectivity of the state. These two conceptions involve and are intimately related to two distinct sets of theological presuppositions and two different conceptions of the political. From a chronological point of view, the Article sketches two diverging genealogies that go back to distinct, even if related, moments in the history of the modern West. Recognizing the fact that in certain historical moments these two genealogies were intertwined and that in our time this intertwinement has yielded a rapid process of hybridization, the Article claims that this process is not dialectical, and that the difference between the two genealogies should be maintained for theoretical and political reasons alike. (shrink)

Research institutions and universities are positioned in a state of inherent struggle to reconcile the pressures and demands of the external environment with those of the scientific community. This paper is focused on one contested area, the division between basic and applied research, and explores how universities work to balance organizational legitimacy and scientific reputation. Building on an in-depth case study of the Weizmann Institute of Science, established as an institute of basic research in the context of the new Israeli (...) state, I explore how managers and scientists at the Institute engaged in organizational experimentation to demarcate basic and applied research during the 1950s–1970s. In analyzing the case of the Weizmann Institute, the paper draws on the concept of boundary-work and explores organizational strategies of boundary-work focused on the demarcation of activities and units and creation of new organizational forms. (shrink)

Under the title The Reformation of Morals , the tenth-century Syrian Orthodox scholar Yahya ibn 'Adi offered encouragement to the effort to promote moral perfection, especially among kings and other members of the social elite: his tract, on the social virtues and vices, gives extensive advice about the cultivation of the former and the extirpation of the latter. Where there are many echoes of Hellenistic moral philosophy in his presentation, the topical profile of the work and the language the author (...) uses reveal his participation in the Baghdad circle of philosophers and intellectuals--both Christian and Muslim--who were responsible for much that has come to be regarded as typical of the classical culture of the Islamic world. In fact, this text has occasionally been attributed to one or another famous Muslim author. It now stands as an important Christian contribution, in Arabic, to a strand of moral philosophy that is an integral component of the intellectual tradition of the world of Islam. (shrink)

The ideas of freedom, justice, democracy and secularism are the main themes in the study of political philosophy. This article attempts to explain Abdolkarim Soroush's political philosophy with the boundaries of themes regarding freedom, justice, secluralism and democracy. Abolkarim Soroush is a thinker in the contemporary Islamic world.

Aristotle's De interpretatione; logic; Islamic philosophy; criticism and interpretation; early works to 1800.

We point out some connections between existence of homogenous sets for certain edge colorings and existence of branches in certain trees. As a consequence, we get that any locally additive coloring (a notion introduced in the paper) of a cardinal κ has a homogeneous set of size κ provided that the number of colors μ satisfies. Another result is that an uncountable cardinal κ is weakly compact if and only if κ is regular, has the tree property, and for each (...) there exists such that every tree of height μ with λ nodes has less than branches. (shrink)

This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo Strauss’ immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young Strauss’ worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing (...) those aspects of his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss’s intellectual biography. By analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar America through reading Strauss’ The City and Man as a representative of his political teaching. (shrink)

The ArgumentMontaigne'sEssayswere an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaigne's private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind ofheterotopiain which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaigne's self (...) as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaigne's library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaigne's skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the author's position and of the identity of the self. (shrink)

In “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger juxtaposes the notion of homelessness (Heimlosigkeit) with home-coming (Heimholung), i.e. the reawakening to our original relationship to Being. This focus on dwelling in Being represents an interesting modification from his earlier study of “incipience” (Anfang), which emphasizes departure. We follow the critique of this shift in thinking in Hannah Arendt’s work, beginning with a short allegory titled “Heidegger the Fox” (1953). We suggest that reading this allegory in the light of Arendt’s decades-long debate with (...) Heidegger illuminates the tense relationship between dwelling and incipience (or in her terms, “natality”). Though we do not attempt a complete analysis of Heidegger and Arendt’s works here, we aim to draw out specific movements of their thinking. We suggest that Arendt’s concept of natality, which, though partly influenced by Heidegger, ultimately challenges the authenticity of Heidegger’s solitary, silent thinker who dwells in the House of Being. In the back and forth between their thinking an unresolvable tension between dwelling and departure arises as the existential fissure. (shrink)

SAT's most recent publication, this English translation from the original Sankrit by Adi Sankara is a very clear, aphoristic explanation of what the self is and the Knowledge that reveals.