sirThis is the third time hospitalised mentally ill patients have voted in Israeli elections.In 1996 the law was changed so that patients, including those in psychiatric hospitals, could participate in elections while hospitalised.Until that year, hospitalised patients could participate in elections only if released from the hospital to vote at their local polling stations.The ability of mentally ill patients to participate in the democratic process has aroused interest over a long period of ….

The study aimed to shed light on the impact of using the digital library in encouraging and developing scientific research from the point of view of graduate students at the College of Business at King Khalid University during the COVID-19 crisis. The descriptive analytical approach was used to achieve the objectives of the study. A questionnaire was used to collect data and information, and the SPSS program was used to analyze the data. The study reached several results, including the fact (...) that the digital library helps detect plagiarism, forgery, copying, and imitation in scientific and technological research and facilitates communication between academic researchers from faculty members and students by logging in. The digital library and the exchange of ideas and information contribute to the development of scientific research. Graduate students use the resources in the digital library to efficiently complete their assignments and scientific research. The use of the digital library contributed to saving time and effort for graduate students. It was recommended that the culture of digital awareness be spread by preparing workshops for graduate students to introduce them to digital libraries and teach them how to use and activate them in the service of scientific research. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to examine the contemporary approaches to Da'wah methodology in Malaysia. This study undertook an examination of the impact of social media platforms on conversion rates within the context of the Da'wah methodology. The use of a quantitative approach is implemented through the application of a cross-sectional research design. A questionnaire survey was devised to gather data from Islamic scholars residing in Malaysia. Questionnaires were disseminated to Islamic scholars using social media platforms. A total of (...) 155 valid responses were collected to investigate the impact of social media on conversion rates. The study focused on various factors including content type, frequency of exposure, duration of exposure, and follow-up interactions. The findings obtained from the application of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) indicate that social media platforms play a significant role in increasing the conversion rate of individuals from different religious backgrounds to Islam. The impact of social media on content type, frequency of exposure, duration of exposure, and follow-up interactions is generally perceived as positive, as it tends to enhance the likelihood of conversion rates. This research holds practical significance for Islamic scholars seeking to enhance conversion rates using diverse social media platforms. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Fehlinterpretierte Dokumente und ignorierte physikalische Fakten: Die Geschichte von,Hitlers Atombombe‘ muss korrigiert werden. Warum haben die deutschen Physiker während des Zweiten Weltkriegs keine Atombombe entwickelt? Seit mehr als 25 Jahren sind sich die Historiker einig, dass die deutschen Physiker wussten, wie eine Atombombe gebaut werden muss, dass aber ein Programm wie das amerikanische Manhattan‐Projekt zu ihrer Realisierung in Deutschland, erst recht während des Krieges, unmöglich war. Eine genaue Analyse aller erhaltenen Original‐Dokumente über die Arbeit an der Atombombe während des,Dritten (...) Reichs‘ zeigt jedoch erhebliche Fehler der Autoren durch unvollständige Analyse der Dokumente, falsches Verständnis naturwissenschaftlicher Erläuterungen und Ignorieren physikalischer Fakten. Es wird nachgewiesen, dass die deutschen Physiker bis zum Ende des Krieges nicht bemerkt hatten, dass eine Atombombe nur mit schnellen Neutronen realisiert werden kann. Nur Heisenberg hatte das richtige Prinzip spät erkannt, es aber nicht eindeutig kommuniziert und auch in keiner Weise physikalisch vertieft. Die physikalisch korrekte Interpretation der Dokumente zeigt, dass die deutschen Physiker während des Krieges erfolglos versuchten, einen Reaktor zu entwickeln, der auch eine Voraussetzung für den Bau einer Plutonium‐Bombe gewesen wäre. Aber sie wussten nicht, wie eine Bombe realisiert werden kann, weil sie nie an einer realistischen Theorie der Atombombe gearbeitet hatten. Summary: Misinterpreted Documents and Ignored Physical Facts: The History of ‘Hitler's Atomic Bomb’ needs to be corrected. Why have the German physicists not developed an atomic bomb during World War II? For more than 25 years, the historians agree that they knew how to build the bomb, but that a bomb‐development programme of the size of the US‐Manhattan‐Project would not have been possible in wartime Germany. A detailed analysis of all preserved documents on the German atomic bomb research during the ‘Third Reich’, however, reveals considerable mistakes by the authors due to incomplete analysis of documents, misinterpretations of scientific explanations and ignoring of physical facts. It is shown that until the end of the war the German physicists did not know that an atomic bomb can only be made with fast neutrons, except Heisenberg, who, however, discovered it rather late, did not communicate it clearly and did not study any bomb physics. The physically correct interpretation of the documents reveals that the German physicists worked unsuccessfully on a reactor, which would have been a prerequisite for a plutonium bomb. But they did not know how to build a bomb because they never worked on a realistic bomb theory. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

To say that the liturgy is a question of faith means that your object is transcendent and has to do with God and with one unique feature, ie, the very act of celebrating an act of faith. The liturgy is not only motivated by faith, but it is their faith in words, which is a very peculiar dimension.

Currently, the dominant enforcement paradigm is based on the idea that states deal with 'bad people' - or those pursuing their own self-interests - with laws that exact a price for misbehavior through sanctions and punishment. At the same time, by contrast, behavioral ethics posits that 'good people' are guided by cognitive processes and biases that enable them to bend the laws within the confines of their conscience. In this illuminating book, Yuval Feldman analyzes these paradigms and provides a (...) broad theoretical and empirical comparison of traditional and non-traditional enforcement mechanisms to advance our understanding of how states can better deal with misdeeds committed by normative citizens blinded by cognitive biases regarding their own ethicality. By bridging the gap between new findings of behavioral ethics and traditional methods used to modify behavior, Feldman proposes a 'law of good people' that should be read by scholars and policymakers around the world. (shrink)

Apart from his critique of Kant, Maimon’s significance for the history of philosophy lies in his crucial role in the rediscovery of Spinoza by the German Idealists. Specifically, Maimon initiated a change from the common eighteenth-century view of Spinoza as the great ‘atheist’ to the view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’, i.e., a thinker who propounded a deep, though unorthodox, religious view denying the reality of the world and taking God to be the only real being. I have discussed this (...) aspect of Maimon’s philosophy in other places, and though the topic of the current paper has an interesting relation to certain doctrines of Spinoza, I will not develop this issue here. Neither of these two issues -- Maimon’s criticism of Kant or his original interpretation of Spinoza -- was considered by Maimon as his main contribution to philosophy. There is little doubt that if Maimon were asked to point out his single most important innovation he would have picked his doctrine of the Principle of Determinability [Satz der Bestimmbarkeit]. Regarding this doctrine Maimon writes: ... [T]he principle of determinability laid down in this work is a principle of all objectively real thought, and consequently of philosophy as a whole too. All the propositions of philosophy can be derived from, and be determined by it [woraus sich alle Sätze herleiten und wodurch sie sich bestimmen lassen]. … I have made available a supreme principle of all objectively real thought, viz., the principle of determinability... and have established as the ground of the whole of pure philosophy -- a principle which, if it is ever grasped, will, I hope, withstand every scrutiny. These claims may strike the reader as somewhat presumptuous, to say the least. But, if we pay attention to the last sentence of the passage, we can see that Maimon doubts whether his great finding will ever be understood. It is not unlikely that in this phrase (“wenn er nur einmal eingesehen werden wird”) Maimon was reacting to his own repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to explain the principle. The fate of Maimon’s principle has not been much better in the few works written on Maimon’s philosophy, and though almost all commentators agree that the principle of determinability is the linchpin of the positive philosophy Maimon was trying to develop, we do not yet have a clear explanation of this principle, or of the reason why Maimon assigns such importance to it. Recently, Oded Schechter developed an excellent reading of this principle, and in most aspects my view agrees with his (primarily, in its rejecting the attempt to explain the principle as a version of Leibniz’s predicate-in-subject [Praedicatum inest subjecto] containment thesis). My paper consists of two parts. The first is expository in nature. In this part, I spell out briefly the main aspects of Maimon’s principle of determinability and its aims. In the second part, I examine Maimon’s surprising claim that once we accept the principle of determinability, we have to deny the possibility of two subjects sharing the same predicate. Maimon provides several proofs for this highly counterintuitive claim, and I will try to clarify and evaluate these proofs. (shrink)

Harry Wolfson’s celebrated two-volume study of Spinoza – The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning – appeared in 1934 with Harvard University Press. The book originated in a series of five studies Wolfson published in the Chronicon Spinozanum between 1921 and 1926. In the Chronicon, Wolfson announced that the studies published in the journal are instalments from a planned larger work, to be titled: “Spinoza, the Last of the Mediaevals: A Study of the Ethica Ordine Geometrico (...) Demonstrata in the light of a hypothetically constructed Ethica More Scholastico Rabbinicoque Demonstrata.” In the preface to the 1934 book, Wolfson notes that the original title “had to be abandoned, as it did not seem advisable to have the title begin with the word ‘Spinoza’”. Thus, whatever stylistic reasons motivated Wolfson to amend the title, he was clearly not withdrawing from his view of Spinoza’s Ethics as being “More Scholastico Rabbinicoque Demonstrata.”. (shrink)

Yitzhak Melamed here offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoza's metaphysics. In the first part of the book, he proposes a new reading of the metaphysics of substance in Spinoza: he argues that for Spinoza modes both inhere in and are predicated of God. Using extensive textual evidence, he shows that Spinoza considered modes to be God's propria. He goes on to clarify Spinoza's understanding of infinity, mereological relations, infinite modes, and the flow of finite (...) things from God's essence. In the second part of the book, Melamed relies on this interpretation of the substance-mode relation and the nature of infinite modes and puts forward two interrelated theses about the structure of the attribute of Thought and its overarching role in Spinoza's metaphysics. First, he shows that Spinoza had not one, but two independent doctrines of parallelism. Then, in his final main thesis, Melamed argues that, for Spinoza, ideas have a multifaceted structure that allows one and the same idea to represent the infinitely many modes which are parallel to it in the infinitely many attributes. Thought turns out to be coextensive with the whole of nature. Spinoza cannot embrace an idealist reduction of Extension to Thought because of his commitment to the conceptual separation of the attributes. Yet, within Spinoza's metaphysics, Thought clearly has primacy over the other attributes insofar as it is the only attribute which is as elaborate, as complex, and, in some senses, as powerful as God. (shrink)

In this ‘age of information’, some worry that we get our news from online ‘echo chambers’, news feeds on our social media accounts that contain information from like‐minded sources. Filtering our information in this way seems prima facie problematic from an epistemic perspective. I vindicate this intuition by offering an explanation of what is wrong with online echo chambers that appeals to a particular kind of motivated reasoning, or bias due to one’s interests. This sort of bias affects, not which (...) evidence one is exposed to, but how one makes use of the evidence that one has, on the basis of one’s interests. I argue that consulting an online echo chamber often facilitates and amplifies this bias. I then draw some general conclusions about the potential downside of having ready access to so much information. (shrink)

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations (...) to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South. (shrink)

Human skin produces numerous neurohormones and neuropeptides. Recent evidence has shown that the neuroendocrine regulation of human skin biology also extends to keratins, the major structural components of epithelial cells. For example, thyrotropin‐releasing hormone, thyrotropin, opioids, prolactin, and cannabinoid receptor 1‐ligands profoundly modulate human keratin gene and protein expression in human epidermis and/or hair follicle epithelium in situ. Since selected keratins are now understood to exert important regulatory functions beyond mechanical stability, we argue that neuroendocrine pathways of keratin regulation are (...) important for maintaining skin and hair follicle homeostasis. This invites innovative neuroendocrine therapeutic interventions for skin disorders characterized by abnormal keratin expression, ranging from psoriasis to genodermatoses, and for promoting skin wound healing and hair growth. This strategy can be probed in simple, but instructive and readily available human skin and hair follicle organ culture assays as ideal models for exploring this new neuroendocrine frontier in translational epithelial biology. (shrink)

Analyses of factual causation face perennial problems, including preemption, overdetermination, and omissions. Arguably, the thorniest, are cases of omissive overdetermination, involving two independent omissions, each sufficient for the harm, and neither, independently, making a difference. A famous example is Saunders, where pedestrian was hit by a driver of a rental car who never pressed on the (unbeknownst to the driver) defective (and, negligently, never inspected) brakes. Causal intuitions in such cases are messy, reflected in disagreement about which omission mattered. What (...) these analyses mistakenly take for granted, is that at issue is the 'efficacy' of each omission. I argue, on the contrary, the puzzle of omissive overdetermination favors taking the act/omission distinction seriously. Factual causation, properly understood precludes omissions (i.e. omissions are not causal). Of course, the law also attaches liability to omissions, but this works differently from liability for real causes (e.g. omissions have a duty requirement, they also respond differentially to difference-making considerations). The manner in which liability attaches for omissions differs from that of straightforward causal liability, and is entirely dependent on the underlying causal structure. Attention to that structure (e.g. that the driver's hitting the pedestrian with his car is what actually caused the injury) sheds light on which omissions matter (e.g. driver's failure to press on the brakes) and why (because that failure removes a defense the driver would have to liability for the accident he caused). Other cases, where the parties' connection is entirely omissive (e.g. two physicians fail to detect independently lethal conditions), come out differently (tracking moralized elements). The analysis offered makes better sense of both why omissive determination cases are puzzling and how to resolve them. (shrink)

In this paper I explore one issue in the history of German Idealism which has been widely neglected in the existing literature. I argue that Salomon Maimon was the first to suggest that Spinoza's pantheism was a radical religious (or 'acosmistic') view rather than atheism. Following a discussion of the historical context of Maimon's engagement with Spinoza, I point out the main Spinozistic element of Maimon 's philosophy: the view of God as the material cause of the world, or as (...) the subject in which all things inhere. I argue that this doctrine was the basis of Maimon's Law of Determinability. (shrink)

Dolev's ambitious project is to show that the traditional debate in the philosophy of time between the so-called ‘tensed’ and ‘tenseless’ theorists is not a sustainable one. The key to the negative portion argument is that both the tensed and tenseless view of time can be understood only from within their respective ontological frameworks. Moreover, that there is only really an appearance of understanding within these frameworks, since neither framework furnishes us with the wherewithal to genuinely understand temporal language. Moving (...) past these frameworks is the goal Dolev sets us. The positive aspect of the text tries to teach us how to transcend this merely ontological dispute and engage in phenomenological considerations of time itself. The conclusion to the positive project is that we cannot postulate an adequate metaphysical system of time, though we can understand what time is if we treat it as the time of our experiences in everyday life.The prospect that we might be able to move past the existing debate into fresh philosophical terrain is exciting. But I am not quite persuaded by the arguments that are intended to motivate the move to pastures new. First, on occasion Dolev seems to slightly …. (shrink)

Dreams are a remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that the human brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate an entire world of conscious experiences by itself. Content analysis and developmental studies have promoted understanding of dream phenomenology. In parallel, brain lesion studies, functional imaging and neurophysiology have advanced current knowledge of the neural basis of dreaming. It is now possible to start integrating these two strands of research to address fundamental (...) questions that dreams pose for cognitive neuroscience: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception. (shrink)

1. Nicholas Robbins argues that, like many other thinkers, Hobbes adopted the monster genre narrative. The commonwealth is interpreted as representing humanity, which is frequently threatened not o...

In this essay I defend a solution to a skeptical paradox. The paradox I focus on concerns epistemic justification (rather than knowledge), and skeptical scenarios that entail that most of our ordinary beliefs about the external world are false. This familiar skeptical paradox hinges on a “closure” principle. The solution is to restrict closure, despite its first appearing as a fully general principle, so that it can no longer give rise to the paradox. This has some extra advantages. First, it (...) suggests a general strategy that provides solutions to other versions of the paradox, not just those that depend on closure. Second, it clarifies the relation between the paradox and other kinds of skeptical problem. (shrink)

The seventeenth century was an important period in the conceptual development of the notion of the infinite. In 1643, Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647)—Galileo’s successor in the chair of mathematics in Florence—communicated his proof of a solid of infinite length but finite volume. Many of the leading metaphysicians of the time, notably Spinoza and Leibniz, came out in defense of actual infinity, rejecting the Aristotelian ban on it, which had been almost universally accepted for two millennia. Though it would be another two (...) centuries before the notion of the actually infinite was rehabilitated in mathematics by Dedekind and Cantor (Cauchy and Weierstrass still considered it mere paradox), their impenitent advocacy of the concept had significant reverberations in both philosophy and mathematics. In this essay, I will attempt to clarify one thread in the development of the notion of the infinite. In the first part, I study Spinoza’s discussion and endorsement, in the Letter on the Infinite (Ep. 12), of Hasdai Crescas’ (c. 1340-1410/11) crucial amendment to a traditional proof of the existence of God (“the cosmological proof” ), in which he insightfully points out that the proof does not require the Aristotelian ban on actual infinity. In the second and last part, I examine the claim, advanced by Crescas and Spinoza, that God has infinitely many attributes, and explore the reasoning that motivated both philosophers to make such a claim. Similarities between Spinoza and Crescas, which suggest the latter’s influence on the former, can be discerned in several other important issues, such as necessitarianism, the view that we are compelled to assert or reject a belief by its representational content, the enigmatic notion of amor Dei intellectualis, and the view of punishment as a natural consequent of sin. Here, I will restrict myself to the issue of the infinite, clearly a substantial topic in itself. (shrink)

The article explains the nature of the immanent cause in Spinoza. It shows that immanent causation is a distinct genus of efficient causation, i.e., an efficient cause whose effect inheres in the cause.

For many of Spinoza's contemporaries and predecessors the very notion of causa sui was utterly absurd, akin to a Baron Munchausen attempting to lift himself above a river by pulling his hair up. This chapter examines Descartes’ engagement with the notion of causa sui, and shows that Spinoza understood the causation of causa sui as efficient, and not formal, causation. Proving the existence of God was the stated aim of Descartes’ Third Meditation. Descartes’ response to Caterus is pretty simple: he (...) denies that efficient causation must be spread in time. Descartes’ surprising response to Caterus drew the attention of Antoine Arnauld, the author of the Fourth Set of Objections, and, at the time, a doctoral student of theology at the Sorbonne. The young Spinoza must have watched Descartes’ struggle with the notion of causa sui with great interest. (shrink)

Moses Maimonides was a rare kind of radical. Being a genuine Aristotelian, he recommended following the middle path and avoiding extremism. Yet, within the sphere of Jewish philosophy and thought, he created a school of philosophical radicalism, inspiring Rabbis and thinkers to be unwilling to compromise their integrity in searching for the truth, regardless of where their arguments might lead. Both Spinoza and Salomon Maimon inherited this commitment to uncompromising philosophical inquiry. But of course, such willingness to follow a philosophical (...) argument to any length is a fine prescription for getting into trouble with community and political leaders. In this paper I will trace the story of one such collision, which took place between the radical philosopher Salomon Maimon and the bourgeois Enlightenment politician, Moses Mendelssohn. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that physics is, always was, and probably always will be voiceless with respect to tense and passage, and that, therefore, if, as I believe, tense and passage are the essence of time, physics’ contribution to our understanding of time can only be limited. The argument, in a nutshell, is that if "physics has no possibility of expression for the Now", to quote Einstein, then it cannot add anything to the study of tense and passage, and (...) specifically, cannot add anything to the debate between deniers and affirmers of the existence or reality of tense and passage. Since relativity theory did not equip physics with a new language with which to speak of tense and passage, I draw the further conclusion that relativity theory has not generated the revolution to our conception of time that is attributed to it. In the last section I discuss the motivations behind the continued but misguided attempts to integrate tense into a relativistic setting, and assess the manners in which relativity theory has nevertheless enhanced, albeit indirectly, our understanding of tense and passage. (shrink)

The term ‘Political Theology’ was not coined in the twentieth century. I am not absolutely sure about who was the first to introduce the term. As we shall shortly see, Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) used the term as part of the title to one of the chapters of his 1792/3 Lebensgeschichte, and it is the primary aim of my chapter to explain his understanding of the term. The idea that views about the divine (‘theology’) – true or false – could have (...) an important role in establishing (or undermining) political order and authority, or even in the promotion of the ideal state, goes back to Maimonides, al-Farabi, and ultimately, Plato. We are likely to hear echoes of these writers in the current chapter. Still, in addressing the background of Maimon’s discussion of political theology, I will focus on the one text which exerted the most significant influence on Maimon’s discussion of the issue: Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise (1670). In order to explain Maimon’s understanding of political theology, we will proceed in the following order. In the first part of the chapter we will have our first encounter with the term and the role of secrets in religious matters. The second part will study Maimon’s definitions of, and distinctions among, various forms of religion. In the third and final part we will explore Maimon’s views about “the greatest of all the mysteries of the Jewish religion” and about the nature of that religion. (shrink)