A fragment of a relief icon, made of steatite plaque, depicting a female saint,was recently found in Acre (Akko) in northern Israel. The plaque has lost the head of the saint, but enough is left of the figure to discern that the pose of the female saint is typically Byzantine. Moreover, the drapery shows stylistic affinities with Komnenian art. The plaque is the first steatite icon found in Palestine and could have arrived in Acre from abroad. The archeological context suggests (...) that it might have been venerated in Acre anytime between the Crusader and the Ottoman periods. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Oldest and Most Respected Uniform in the World1Zelig R. Weinstein“And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the name of the LORD is called upon thee; and they shall be afraid of thee.”(Deuteronomy 28:10)Rabbi Eliezer the Great says that this verse alludes to the Tefillin Shel Rosh, the small leather box containing Biblical verses that are worn by Jewish men on their head. During Talmudic (...) times and for centuries after, devout Jewish men would wear Tefillin the entire day. This practice is now only rarely seen. Since the 1960s, there has been a resurgence of public display of one’s adherence to traditional Jewish practices. It is increasingly common to see Jewish men wearing a yarmulke at work and in public spheres. There are perhaps thousands of Jewish doctors who don’t hesitate to wear their yarmulke in their places of practice–hospital, clinic, private practice.In the 1980s I joined the staff of the Department of Radiology at the Bethesda Naval Hospital as the Director of Neuroradiology and Interventional Radiology. As the hospital’s Neuroradiologist I presented the radiological findings for the cases presented at the bimonthly “brain cutting” sessions. These sessions were well attended by staff, residents and medical students from the Departments of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Neuropathology and Radiology. I was the only traditional Orthodox Jew at the hospital, clearly recognizable as such by the yarmulke I always wore (very unusual in the early 1980s). My yarmulke would provoke occasional good–natured kidding particularly from the neurosurgery staff and residents. [End Page 212]During one of these sessions, kidding about my yarmulke from a small group of residents was reaching a crescendo. The kidding came to a sudden halt when the Chief Resident of Neuro-surgery, a born and bred Louisianan, demanded everyone’s attention. When it quieted down he very sternly ordered everyone to carefully look at their uniforms. Everyone seemed perplexed but all followed suit. Almost a half–minute passed before the Chief Resident, with his thick Southern drawl, spoke. “Our [naval] uniforms are, at most, a couple of hundred years old.” He then pointed toward my yarmulke and said: “Dr. Weinstein’s uniform is thousands of years old and a lot more respected than our uniforms.”This was my initiation into the alluring, usually positive and unexpected fascination and respect that my obvious religiosity had on my patients, their families and my many colleagues during the almost seven years I spent at Bethesda.The story I will tell is very poignant. It involved the family of one of the most senior Chief Petty Officers of the United States Navy.Late one Sunday evening, I received a call from the Chief Resident, Dr. Steve Henning, informing me that the family matriarch had been admitted to Bethesda with relatively acute onset of significant neurological findings. The emergent workup confirmed the presence of a large mass, a meningioma, of the frontal lobe region with significant surrounding edema and mass effect. Neurosurgery requested embolization of the feeding vessels prior to surgery. The interventional procedure and possible serious complications were fully explained to the patient, her husband and her two daughters. Consent was signed and early Monday morning the patient was brought to Special Procedures to have the tumor embolized.Prior to the procedure I introduced myself to the patient’s family and spoke to them about the procedure. The patient’s husband and two daughters, one of whom was an active duty Navy nurse the other a minister of a fundamentalist church in the South, were very attentive and expressed concern about the procedure and its outcome. I tried to reassure them and told them I would speak to them during and after the procedure.All went well. Medically, the patient did well during and after the procedure. She was discharged from our care to neurosurgery. The patient and her family thanked us.After the patient left the Special Procedures area the Chief Technologist, Al, approached me and very cryptically asked if I was aware of what happened when the Chief Resident, Dr. Henning, spoke with the patient and family the night before. I was puzzled and replied, no. He... (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important, influential, and often-cited philosophers of the twentieth century, yet he remains one of its most elusive and least accessible. The essays in this volume address central themes in Wittgenstein's writings on the philosophy of mind, language, logic, and mathematics. They chart the development of his work and clarify the connections between its different stages. The contributors illuminate the character of the whole body of work by keeping a tight focus on some key (...) topics: the style of the philosophy, the conception of grammar contained in it, rule-following, convention, logical necessity, the self, and what Wittgenstein called, in a famous phrase, 'forms of life'. (shrink)

Jim Joyce has argued that David Lewis’s formulation of causal decision theory is inadequate because it fails to apply to the “small world” decisions that people face in real life. Meanwhile, several authors have argued that causal decision theory should be developed such that it integrates the interventionist approach to causal modeling because of the expressive power afforded by the language of causal models, but, as of now, there has been little work towards this end. In this paper, I propose (...) a variant of Lewis’s causal decision theory that is intended to meet both of these demands. Specifically, I argue that Lewis’s causal decision theory can be rendered applicable to small world decisions if one analyzes his dependency hypotheses as causal hypotheses that depend on the interventionist causal modeling framework for their semantics. I then argue that this interventionist variant of Lewis’s causal decision theory is preferable to interventionist causal decision theories that purportedly generalize Lewis’s through the use of conditional probabilities. This is because Lewisian interventionist decision theory captures the causal decision theorist’s conviction that any correlation between what the agent does and cannot cause should be irrelevant to the agent’s choice, while purported generalizations do not. (shrink)

This paper examines a broad range of ethical perspectives and principles relevant to the analysis of issues raised by the science of climate change and explores their implications. A second and companion paper extends this analysis to the contribution of ethics, economics and politics in understanding policy towards climate change. These tasks must start with the science which tells us that this is a problem of risk management on an immense scale. Risks on this scale take us far outside the (...) familiar policy questions and standard, largely marginal, techniques commonly used by economists; this is a subject that requires the full breadth and depth of what economics has to offer and a much more thoughtful view of ethics than economists usually bring to bear. Different philosophical approaches bring different perspectives on understanding and policy, yet they generally point to the case for strong action to manage climate change. (shrink)

Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal (...) and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable. (shrink)

Eliezer Eilburg: The Ten Questions and Memoir of a Renaissance Jew makes available for the first time a bilingual edition of two key works by the Jewish rationalist skeptic, kabbalist, and memoirist, Eliezer Eilburg.

We can see personhood as a philosophical and historical struggle between positive and negative forms of ‘being at one’, a struggle most succinctly described by Hölderlin, a central figure in Romanticism and in German idealism through his close friendship and collaboration with Schelling and Hegel. For Hölderlin, ‘Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania / Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way’. This paper is an exploration of (...) a range of forms of aloneness, linked by the family resemblance of a number of such ‘solitude’ terms (loneliness, solitude, solitary, aloneness, lonesome, individual, atonement) to the idea of ‘oneness’. ‘Being at one’ was distinctively articulated in the Romantic period, in philosophy as well as in the arts. Based on this distinctiveness, this article presents an historical account of the developing philosophical anthropology of being at one, dividing the development of ‘being at one’ between the pre-Romantic, Romantic, and post-Romantic eras. (shrink)

This paper details a “metadisciplinary” applied ethics course jointly taught and pioneered by a biologist, psychologist, and ethicist on the subject of Assisted Reproduction. Contrasted with a transdisciplinary approach (whose content involves themes or issues that span traditional disciplinary lines) and a multidisciplinary approach (which involves experts from several disciplines working side by side), a metadisciplinary approach involves both of these former characteristics while incorporating a continuous, critical appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of the contrasting methods and scopes of (...) each discipline’s methods of inquiry. This paper details the kinds of subjects that lend themselves to metadisciplinary approaches (e.g. applied ethics subjects which are real-world, complex, and studied by various disciplines), staffing guidelines for a smoothly functioning core team, how to plan and prepare the day-to-day of such a course to prevent a diffuse lesson structure, assignment and evaluation guidelines, and an appraisal of the value of such a class. The authors argue that while fundamental research may be conducted along traditional disciplinary lines, solutions to the complex problems of contemporary society require people who are equipped with problem-solving skills whose relevance spans disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

No verão de 1932, Wittgenstein alegou que o artigo recentemente publicado porCarnap “Linguagem Física como Linguagem Universal da Ciência” fez uso extensivo e semmenções das idéias do próprio Wittgenstein. Em uma carta a Schlick, ele se queixou que“em breve estaria em uma situação na qual seu próprio trabalho seria considerado meramentecomo uma versão requentada ou plágio do de Carnap”. Neste artigo, examino arelação entre o artigo de Carnap, posteriormente reimpresso como A Unidade da Ciência, eo tratamento dispensado por Wittgenstein, nos (...) primeiros sete capítulos das ObservaçõesFilosóficas e outros escritos entre 1929-1932, a assuntos relacionados. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin's influence on Theodor Adorno centers on the former's early philosophy of language, which drew on manifold sources, including importantly the theological writings of Johann Georg Hamann. Adorno adapts this “expressivist” philosophy of language as part of a critique of Hegel's dialectic that forms the basis for Adorno's understanding of epistemology and social criticism. The result of this tempered influence is that Benjamin's and Adorno's projects share a great deal of common ground and vocabulary, but diverge in fundamental ways. (...) These tensions come to the fore in Adorno's 1930s criticisms of Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project. Of particular import are their respective understandings of Benjamin's notion of a constellation. For Adorno the constellation is a response to the dialectical tension in the relation between subject and object, while for Benjamin it transcends that relation. (shrink)