Questions regarding the formation of the Universe and ‘what was there’ before it came to existence have been of great interest to mankind at all times. Several suggestions have been presented during the ages – mostly assuming a preliminary state prior to creation. Nevertheless, theories that require initial conditions are not considered complete, since they lack an explanation of what created such conditions. We therefore propose the ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’ (CEN) theory, aimed at describing the origin of the Universe from (...) ‘nothing’ in information terms. The suggested framework does not require amendments to the laws of physics: but rather provides a new scenario to the Universe initiation process, and from that point merges with state-of-the-art cosmological models. The paper is aimed at providing a first step towards a more complete model of the Universe creation – proving that creation Ex Nihilo is feasible. Further adjustments, elaborations, formalisms and experiments are required to formulate and support the theory. (shrink)

This book opens by providing the historical context of Plato’s engagement with education, including an overview of Plato’s life as student and educator. The author organizes his discussion of education in the Platonic Corpus around Plato’s images, both the familiar – the cave, the gadfly, the torpedo fish, and the midwife – and the less familiar – the intellectual aviary, the wax tablet, and the kindled fire. These educational images reveal that, for Plato, philosophizing is inextricably linked to learning; that (...) is, philosophy is fundamentally an educational endeavor. The book concludes by exploring Plato’s legacy in education, discussing the use of the “Socratic method” in schools and the Academy’s foundational place in the history of higher education. The characters in Plato’s dialogues often debate – sometimes with great passion – the purpose of education and the nature of learning. The claims about education in the Platonic corpus are so provocative, nuanced, insightful, and controversial that educational philosophers have reckoned with them for millennia. (shrink)

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues (...) that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'. -/- Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy. (shrink)

Avi Sion's book The Logic of Causation (2010) could not include all relevant tables (which either justified or applied various doctrines in the book), due to their sizes or quantity. These additional tables were made available to interested readers at time of publication in the author's website The Logician. The present 'Annex' collects in one pdf file the numerous original pdf files, to facilitate download. The file is almost 0.5 Gb in size, and contains almost 108,000 pages.

The question at hand is whether or not a liberal arts education can be politically neutral, but the very fact that this question is phrased in the curious manner that it is, which is to say that we place emphasis on "can" as opposed to "is" or "how we might better ensure," speaks to the nature of a problem that much more deeply rooted than the mere question of scholarly polarization. Borrowing from Christopher Schlect of New Saint Andrews College, we (...) might say that the "liberal arts teach us how to learn—how to freely gain knowledge and understanding," and that the manner in which they do this is by teaching students not only methodologies for solving problems that are presented to them, but also how to identify problems of their own accord (79). That would mean, by definition, that a political neutral liberal arts curriculum would necessitate not only an active awareness of one's ethical orientation, but also an active tempering of the biases that accompany that orientation out of respect for the spirit of liberalism and in recognition of one's own fallible nature. Unfortunately, since, as I intend to illustrate, our moral and therefore political senses are similar to aesthetic taste as described by Kant in his third critique, they carry with them the paradoxicality of pure subjectivity tethered to the expectation of universality, making the possibility of political neutrality in the liberal arts a grim proposition, to put it at its absolute mildest. In order to determine whether this problem is in any way manageable, it is necessary to analyze of the nature of moral and political taste in a general sense, the rhetoric that educator use toward members of opposing moral frameworks, how that rhetoric is buttressed by institutional teloi, and finally, how different systems of normative ethics might contribute to neutrality in the liberal arts. (shrink)

For over fifty years, scholars have argued that a therapeutic ethos has begun to change how people think about themselves and others. There is also a growing concern that the therapeutic ethos has influenced educational theory and practice, perhaps to their detriment. This review article discusses three books, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (by Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes), Aristotle, Emotions, and Education (by Kristján Kristjánsson), and The Therapy of Education (by Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish), that (...) point to the problematic assumptions and outcomes of therapeutic educational practices. The authors of the three books, however, disagree about whether a focus on emotions or therapy in education is necessarily an unwelcome intrusion into education. (shrink)

Patterns of reproductive failure described in humans and other mammals suggest that reproductive failure may in many instances be the result of adaptations evolved to suppress reproduction under temporarily harsh conditions. By suppressing reproduction under such conditions, females are able to conserve their time and energy for reproductive opportunities in which reproduction is most likely to succeed. Such adaptations have been particularly important for female mammals, given (a) the amount of time and energy that reproduction requires, and (b) the degree (...) to which reproductive conditions can vary.The existence of conscious and unconscious mechanisms to suppress reproduction under poor conditions has several implications for obstetric/gynecologic practices. Two implications are discussed with reference to biotechnological advancements in our ability to facilitate conceptions and manage problem pregnancies: (a) potential dangers of sophisticated technologies overriding natural fertility controls; and (b) the need for greater appreciation of the association between psychosocial stress and reproductive failure in the treatment of reproductive problems. Implications for elective abortion practices are discussed as well. (shrink)

Background Coping with end-of-life issues is a major challenge for governments and health systems. Despite progress in legislation, many barriers exist to its full implementation. This study is aimed at identifying these end-of-life barriers in relation to Israel. Methods Qualitative in-depth interviews using professionals and decision makers in the health-care and related systems were carried out, along with two focus groups based on brainstorming techniques consisting of nurses and social workers. Data was managed and analyzed using Naralyzer software. Results Qualitative (...) analysis showed identification of six primary barriers: 1) law, procedures, and forms; 2) clinical aspects; 3) human aspects; 4) knowledge and skills of medical teams; 5) communication; and 6) resource allocation. These were further divided into 44 sub area barriers. Conclusions This study highlights the role of the family doctor in end-of-life by training physicians in decision-making workshops and increasing their knowledge in the field of palliative medicine. Effectively channeling resources, knowledge, and support for medical teams, by accounting for the structure and response of the units for home treatment will improve patient’s access to information on and support for end-of-life laws, as well as reduce legislative barriers in other countries that face the same issues. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the impact of CEO and board gender diversity on the risk management decisions of 179 U.S. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) during the 2001–2018 period. Using a bottom-up analysis on the properties in REIT portfolios, we find significant risk reduction associated with gender-diverse REIT leadership. We document that REITs with a woman CEO, in combination with more women on the board, display less active trading and a longer hold period for assets. In addition, REITs with (...) more gender-diverse leadership are more geographically focused, which for REITs is considered a lower risk investment strategy. Finally, REITs with more gender-diverse leadership are more actively investing in environmentally sustainable real estate. We conclude that gender diversity in real estate firms carries real-life implications for U.S. cities, given their key role as developers, owners, and operators of the built world. (shrink)

Avi Shulman has taught thousands of people how to look at life and see positive ways to make everything better. In this precious collection of his astute observations, he shares a wealth of wisdom in his concise and simple manner that always hits the target and makes the reader ask himself, why didn't I think of that? With lessons on assuming responsibility, setting attainable goals, creating a warm atmosphere at home, and avoiding the feeling of burnout, Vitamins for the Spirit (...) is a joy to read and an incredible investment in your future happiness and success. (shrink)

[To readers: Please consider visiting the journal's website to read this work.] In spite of referring to the human tendency to "breath together" or share the same spirit, the word "conspire" has developed a negative connotation in contemporary society, specifically as it pertains to theorizing about conspiracies as a result of the human proclivity to recognize patterns recognition and coalesce common themes amongst those with shared perceptions into something resembling a unified narrative. This proclivity has only become more pronounced with (...) the dawn of the Internet age, and as a result, the tendency to assume the actuality of certain conspiracies and insulate ourselves from viable, competing ideas has led to a series of microenvironments not dissimilar from those that allow for the proliferation of cancerous cells in the human body. In this article, I draw out the analogy between cancer and conspiracy theorizing in order to present readers with a clearer picture of the deleterious effects of the contemporary phenomena such as unbridled political polarization and the effect of sociopolitical news coverage presented by low-correlation outlets, otherwise known as "echo chambers.". (shrink)

We characterize pairs of monotone generalized quantifiers Q1 and Q2 over finite domains that give rise to an entailment relation between their two relative scope construals. This relation between quantifiers, which is referred to as scope dominance, is used for identifying entailment relations between the two scopal interpretations of simple sentences of the form NP1–V–NP2. Simple numerical or set-theoretical considerations that follow from our main result are used for characterizing such relations. The variety of examples in which they hold are (...) shown to go far beyond the familiar existential-universal type. (shrink)

This paper reviews the social scientific literature on biometric surveillance, with particular attention to its potential harms. It maps the harms caused by biometric surveillance, traces their theoretical origins, and brings these harms together in one integrative framework to elucidate their cumulative power. Demonstrating these harms with examples from the United States, the European Union, and Israel, I propose that biometric surveillance be addressed, evaluated and reframed as a new form of control rather than simply another means of inspection. I (...) conclude by delineating three features of biometric technologies—complexity, objectivity, and agency—that demonstrate their social power and draw attention to the importance of studying biometric surveillance. (shrink)

Are toleration and pluralism possible in Jewish religion? -- Yeshayahu Leibovitz : the man against his thought -- Leibowitz and Camus : between faith and the absurd -- Jewish religion without theology -- The critique of theodicy : from metaphysics to praxis -- The Holocaust : a theological or a religious-existentialist problem? -- Tikkun Olam : between utopian idea and socio-historical process.

Although trauma has been an explicit topic of psychological interest since at least the late 19th century, as a phenomenon it has largely evaded deeper analyses that might other reframe the way the condition is perceived and understood. A Theory of Trauma attempts to address the exigence of trauma-based research, first, by approaching the matter using phenomenological, philological and hermeneutical methods in an attempt to extract an ontological understanding of trauma from the otherwise ontical body of work that characterizes both (...) historical and contemporary psychological works surrounding the matter. The second half of the text is dedicated to reorienting the reader in terms of the nature of thought itself, an effort grounded by one of Heidegger's later works, What is Called Thinking?, in terms of the reasoning people have for considering matters as deep-rooted as trauma, and finally, in practical terms, to wit, identifying manifest forms of trauma by way of anecdotal vignettes. (shrink)

Plato’s Apology of Socrates contains a spirited account of Socrates’ relationship with the city of Athens and its citizens. As Socrates stands on trial for corrupting the youth, surprisingly, he does not defend the substance and the methods of his teaching. Instead, he simply denies that he is a teacher. Many scholars have contended that, in having Socrates deny he is a teacher, Plato is primarily interested in distinguishing him from the sophists. In this article, I argue that, given the (...) historic educational transformation in Socrates’ and Plato’s lifetimes, Socrates’ denial is far more complex and far reaching than the Socrates-versus-the-sophists distinction indicates. Socrates suggests that Athenians have failed to recognize that there were various types among the new educators of fifth century Athens: orators, sophists, natural philosophers and, perhaps, a philosopher like Socrates. Further, the traditional education, which the Athenians believed was threatened by the new educators, was itself fractured. Ultimately, rather than offering a straightforward distinction between philosophizing and teaching, Socrates and the sophists, Plato treats the question of teaching aporectically in Apology; that is, after pointing to various alternatives for understanding the nature of teaching, Plato concludes the work without offering a clear resolution to that question. (shrink)

_NeuroAnalysis _investigates using the neural network and neural computation models to bridge the divide between psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience when diagnosing mental health disorders and prescribing treatment. Avi Peled builds on Freud's early attempts to explain the neural basis of mental health by introducing neural computation as a bridging science to explain psychiatric disorders. Peled describes the brain as a complex system of interconnected units and goes on to suggest that conscious experience, feelings, and mood are emergent properties arising from (...) these complex organisations. This model describes mental health disorders in terms of perturbation to the optimal brain organisation, and demonstrates how particular disorders can be identified through a specific breakdown pattern of the brain’s organisation. This fresh approach to the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders will interest students, professors, and researchers of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and their related fields. (shrink)

One of the mantras of progressive education is that genuine learning ought to be exciting and pleasurable, rather than joyless and painful. To a significant extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is associated with this mantra. In a theme of Emile that is often neglected in the educational literature, however, Rousseau stated that “to suffer is the first thing [Emile] ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know.” Through a discussion of Rousseau's argument for the importance of an education (...) in suffering, Avi Mintz contends that the reception of Rousseau by progressives suggests a detrimental misstep in the history of educational thought, a misstep that we should recognize and correct today. We ought to revive the progressive tradition of distinguishing the valuable educational pains from the harmful ones, even if we disagree with the particular types of pain that Rousseau identified as educationally valuable. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Brief History of Socratic Method and Socratic Teaching Teaching Through Questions The Features of Contemporary Socratic Education Conclusion.

COVID-19 created a global crisis of unprecedented comprehensiveness affecting personal and professional lives of individuals worldwide. The pandemic and various governmental guidelines associated with it had numerous consequences for the workplace and the marketplace. In light of the global nature and multiplicity of the consequences of the pandemic, this study examines the impact of individual characteristics of respondents from three countries from various areas of the world: China, Israel, and the USA toward COVID-19 related business ethics decisions in three different (...) spheres: human resources, marketing, and social responsibility. Data from 374 respondents in these three countries indicated that moral disengagement was negatively related to all of the ethical decisions presented, with national pride moderating the above. Possible implications of these findings and future research directions are presented. (shrink)

In this article Johann David Michaelis’s views of language and translation are juxtaposed with his own experience as a translated and translating author, especially with regard to the translations of his prize essay on the reciprocal influence of language and opinions (1759). Its French version originated in a close collaboration with the translators, while the pirated English edition was anonymously translated at second hand. The article reconstructs Michaelis’s relationship with the French translators and his renouncement of the English version, publicly (...) condemned in London by Robert Lowth at the author’s request. These two processes represent different contemporary modes of translation and shed new light on emerging theories of linguistic and cultural transfer. (shrink)

In Democracy and Education, in the midst of the pivotal chapter on “The Democratic Conception in Education,” Dewey juxtaposes his educational aims with those of Plato, Rousseau, Fichte and Hegel. Perhaps Dewey believed that an account of their views would help elucidate his own, or he intended to suggest that his own ideas rivaled or bested theirs. I argue that Dewey’s discussion of historical philosophers’ aims of education was also designed to critique his contemporaries subtly and by analogy. My analysis (...) of Dewey’s critique supports a second argument: one of the reasons Dewey’s legacy has been long debated (particularly his relationship to pedagogical progressivism) derives from his reluctance to criticize his contemporaries explicitly and directly. Had Dewey critiqued his fellow American progressives in the same way he did historical European philosophers of the past, his readers would have better understood his relationship to progressive American educational ideas and practices. Yet Dewey’s subtle approach also accounts for the creation of a work that genuinely warrants being called a classic – it rises above the educational debates of the early twentieth century to enter into a conversation with its educational ancestry, a conversation that Dewey propelled forward. (shrink)

This book is a first attempt to examine the thought of key contemporary Jewish thinkers on the meaning of tradition in the context of two models. The classic model assumes that tradition reflects lack of dynamism and reflectiveness, and the present’s unqualified submission to the past. This view, however, is an image that the modernist ethos has ascribed to the tradition so as to remove it from modern existence. In the alternative model, a living tradition emerges as open and dynamic, (...) developing through an ongoing dialogue between present and past. The Jewish philosophers discussed in this work—Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, David Hartman, and Eliezer Goldman—ascribe compelling canonic status to the tradition, and the analysis of their thought discloses the tension between these two models. The book carefully traces the course they have plotted along the various interpretations of tradition through their approach to Scripture and to Halakhah. (shrink)

This article contributes to debates concerning the sexualization of culture in the European context by analysing shifts in contemporary forms of British women’s sexual sexual subjectivities in relation to consumer culture. The article employs a ‘heterotopological’ analysis of how space is materialized through history, power and discourse. A two-part analysis is employed that, first, maps the history of British sex shops in relation to two discourses of sexuality and consumption, namely ‘safe’ and ‘seedy’; and second, analyses how these discourses can (...) be taken up and negotiated by young women today, as evidenced in a focus group discussion on ‘Ann Summers’. It concludes that new directions and interesting insights into the intersections of space, power, gender and sexuality within neoliberal postfeminist shifts in feminine identity can be made by considering female-oriented sex shops as ‘postfeminist heterotopias’. (shrink)

A prevailing concern in aesthetics is the meaning and purpose of art, and with respect to that concern, there are just as likely as many philosophies about the matter as there are individual pieces of art in the world. I believe that Kant (2001) was correct that this is a result of the human capacity for taste, that faculty that makes the judgment of beauty possible, which is ultimately subjective in spite of the feeling that such intimations are necessary and (...) are therefore sufficient to warrant universal appeal (p. 89/5:204). Scholarship, therefore, finds itself in a bind, since that implies that the search for universal artistic meaning would be a fool's errand, that determining the value of artistic works necessarily requires case-by-case analyses, and that the development of the aesthetic sense of the utmost importance to those in the humanities, especially at a time when reproductions of famous works can be had on the cheap. We must not forget that in spite of these difficulties, art has something to say, and as such, it falls upon scholars to pay attention to what is said in order to better understand art in generalis to the extent that such understanding is possible. In this article, I explore the idea of presence as it pertains to the meaning of Jon Carsman's work in light of the stated purpose of his artistic life, to "give [the viewer] a feel of what it is like to be there when [he] was" (Petrillo 2003, p. 5). (shrink)

'A mere metaphor', 'only symbolic', 'just a myth' - these tell tale phrases reveal how figurative language has been cheapened and devalued in our modern and postmodern culture. In God and the Creative Imagination, Paul Avis argues the contrary: we see that actually, metaphor, symbol and myth, are the key to a real knowledge of God and the sacred. Avis examines what he calls an alternative tradition, stemming from the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth and Keats and drawing on the thought (...) of Cleridge and Newman, and experience in both modern philosophy and science. God and the Creative Imagination intriguingly draws on a number of non-theological disciplines, from literature to philosophy of science, to show us that God is appropriately likened to an artist or poet and that the greatest truths are expressed in an imaginative form. Anyone wishing to further their understanding of God, belief and the imagination will find this an inspiring work. (shrink)

This article studies the monotonicity behavior of plural determinersthat quantify over collections. Following previous work, we describe thecollective interpretation of determiners such as all, some andmost using generalized quantifiers of a higher type that areobtained systematically by applying a type shifting operator to thestandard meanings of determiners in Generalized Quantifier Theory. Twoprocesses of counting and existential quantification thatappear with plural quantifiers are unified into a single determinerfitting operator, which, unlike previous proposals, both capturesexistential quantification with plural determiners and respects theirmonotonicity (...) properties. However, some previously unnoticed factsindicate that monotonicity of plural determiners is not always preservedwhen they apply to collective predicates. We show that the proposedoperator describes this behavior correctly, and characterize themonotonicity of the collective determiners it derives. It is proved thatdeterminer fitting always preserves monotonicity properties ofdeterminers in their second argument, but monotonicity in the firstargument of a determiner is preserved if and only if it is monotonic inthe same direction in the second argument. We argue that this asymmetryfollows from the conservativity of generalized quantifiers innatural language. (shrink)

The nature of "silence" is something of a recurring theme of contemplative philosophies far and wide, but more often than not silence is relegated to being little more than a mere concept or worse, a completely social phenomenon that chalks the matter up as some negation of humanity's "linguistic" way of being. Silence, it would seem, is "nothing" of the sort, but the only way to determine whether or not that is the case would be to contemplate exactly how silence (...) ought to be considered, if, in fact, silence can be considered at all. In this article, I wrestle with the ontological reality of silence using Heidegger's treatment of the Nothing as a waymark, ultimately revealing the interrelatedness of presence and silence as conditions, and opening up possible avenues for new discussions related to meditative and contemplative practice. (shrink)

A number of recent studies have examined the sources of conflict surrounding the presence of Muslim minorities in Western contexts. This article builds upon, and challenges, some of the principal findings of this literature through analyzing popular opposition to mosques in Badalona, a historically industrial city in Catalonia where several of the most vigorous anti-mosque campaigns in Spain have occurred. Drawing upon 46 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation conducted over a two-year period, I argue that opposition to mosques in Badalona (...) is not reducible to anti-Muslim prejudice or fears of Islamic extremism. Rather, it is rooted in powerful associations drawn between Islam, immigration, and a series of social problems affecting the character of communal life and the quality of cherished public spaces in the city. These associations are expressed through local narratives that emphasize a sharp rupture between a glorified ethnically homogeneous past of community and solidarity, and a troublesome multicultural present fraught with social insecurity and disintegration. I show how the construction of these “rupture narratives” has entailed active memory work that minimizes the significance of prior social cleavages and conflicts, and selectively focuses on disjuncture over continuity with the past. I also highlight how these narratives have been reinforced by strong socio-spatial divisions, which have intensified contestations over public space and led to the integration of mosque disputes into broader struggles over social justice and public recognition. (shrink)