This is a response to Dr Joseph Mazor’s paper ‘The child's interests and the case for the permissibility of male infant circumcision.’ I argue that Dr Mazor fails to prove that bodily integrity and self-determination are mere interests as opposed to genuine rights in the case of infant male circumcision. Moreover, I cast doubt on the interest calculus that Dr Mazor employs to arrive at his conclusions about circumcision.

Ḳarnot tsadiḳ -- Liḳuṭe Eliyahu -- Minhage ḳ.ḳ. 'Bet Ya'aḳ ov' be-Ḥevron.

_A paradigm-shifting account of the modern Jewish experience, from one of the most creative young historians of his generation_ To understand the organizing framework of modern Judaism, Eliyahu Stern believes that we should look deeper and farther than the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the influence and affluence of American Jewry. Against the revolutionary backdrop of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, Stern unearths the path that led a group of rabbis, scientists, communal leaders, and political upstarts to reconstruct (...) the core tenets of Judaism and join the vanguard of twentieth-century revolutionary politics. In the face of dire poverty and rampant anti-Semitism, they mobilized Judaism for projects directed at ensuring the fair and equal distribution of resources in society. Their program drew as much from the universalism of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin as from the messianism and utopianism of biblical and Kabbalistic works. Once described as a religion consisting of rituals, reason, and rabbinics, Judaism was now also rooted in land, labor, and bodies. Exhaustively researched, this original, revisionist account challenges our standard narratives of nationalism, secularization, and de-Judaization. (shrink)

Older adults often have long-term relationships, and many of their goals are intertwined with their respective partners. Joint goals can help or hinder goal progress. Little is known about how accurately older adults assess if a goal is joint, the role of over-reporting in these perceptions, and how joint goals and over-reporting may relate to older partners' relationship satisfaction and physical health. Two-hundred-thirty-six older adults from 118 couples listed their three most important goals and whether they thought of them as (...) goals they had in common with and wanted to achieve together with their partner. Two independent raters classified goals as “joint” if both partners independently listed open-ended goals of the same content. Goal progress and relationship satisfaction were assessed 1 week later. Allostatic load was calculated using nine different biomarkers. Results show that 85% self-reported at least one goal as joint. Over-reporting– the perception that a goal was joint when in fact it was not mentioned among the three most salient goals of the spouse – occurred in one-third of all goals. Multilevel models indicate that the number of externally-rated joint goals was related to greater goal progress and lower allostatic load, but only for adults with little over-reporting. More joint goals and higher over-reporting were each linked with more relationship satisfaction. In conclusion, joint goals are associated with goal progress, relationship satisfaction, and health, but the association is dependent on the domain of functioning. (shrink)

English text -- Endnotes. Bibliography. Hebrew abstract.

Eliyahu Rosenow; Kierkegaard's Existing Individual, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–13, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

Negative campaign advertising is a major component of the electoral landscape, and has received much attention in the literature. In many studies, political scientists have tried to explain why some campaign ads contain more negative messages than others and to identify the determinants of this form of campaign behavior. In recent years, a number of studies have acknowledged the differences between alternative measures of negativity, but, in most cases, it is assumed that since these measures are highly correlated, they are (...) unidimensional and essentially interchangeable. In this article, we argue that much of the debate in the literature over negative campaigning is a result of inadequate operationalizations of negativity. Although debates over negativity have often been framed in conceptual terms, there is a methodological explanation for why they persist We begin our analysis by constructing reliable scales of negativity, and model them with salient predictors reported in the literature as significantly associated with campaign attacks. Our findings show that scaling does matter, and while some of the explanatory variables are robust predictors of negativity, most of them are not. (shrink)

Gyrogroup theory and its applications is introduced and explored, exposing the fascinating interplay between Thomas precession of special relativity theory and hyperbolic geometry. The abstract Thomas precession, called Thomas gyration, gives rise to grouplike objects called gyrogroups [A, A. Ungar, Am. J. Phys.59, 824 (1991)] the underlying axions of which are presented. The prefix gyro extensively used in terms like gyrogroups, gyroassociative and gyrocommutative laws, gyroautomorphisms, and gyrosemidirect products, stems from their underlying abstract Thomas gyration. Thomas gyration is tailor (...) made for hyperbolic geometry. In a similar way that commutative groups underlie vector spaces, gyrocommutative gyrogroups underlie gyrovector spaces. Gyrovector spaces, in turn, provide a most natural setting for hyperbolic geometry in full analogy with vector spaces that provide the setting for Euclidean geometry. As such, their applicability to relativistic physics and its spacetime geometry is obvious. (shrink)

The article examines the educational interpretations given to Nietzsche throughout the three last decades in English and in German, compares the educational images of Nietzsche portrayed in these interpretations and elaborates on the conclusions resulting from this comparison. Whereas Nietzsche appears in Anglo-American educational interpretations as a democratic and humane educator par excellence, German interpreters not only disqualify him as an educator, but practically erase his philosophy from educational theory. The comparison of these interpretations manifests the problem of the relationship (...) between ideology and philosophy of education. (shrink)

Inertial frames and Lorentz transformations have a preferred status in the special theory of relativity (STR). Lorentz transformations, in turn, embody Einstein's convention that the velocity of light is isotropic, a convention that is necessary for the establishment of a standard signal synchrony. If the preferred status of Lorentz transformations in STR is not due to some particular bias introduced by a convention on signal synchronism, but to the fact that the Lorentz transformation group is the symmetry group of the (...) theory, then the signal synchronism is not a matter of convention but rather a matter of fact. In order to explore the conventionalist thesis, that within the frame of STR isotropy in the velocity of light and, hence, signal synchronism is a matter of convention, we need a generalized Lorentz transformation group that does not embody Einstein's isotropy convention, and upon which STR can be based. We present here a new approach to the resulting search for a generalized STR, which is well suited for establishing some well-known results of Winnie as well as some new results. (shrink)

Dewey declares that the teacher’s calling is to be ‘the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God’. This apparently religious declaration seems inconsistent with Dewey’s philosophical position. An examination of Dewey’s writings on religious issues reveals that his religious faith is a secular belief in democratic ideals, and that his teacher’s alleged religious mission is in fact a worldly one. This article claims that Dewey’s religious conception is a pragmatic conception designed to (...) answer the social needs of American society in the 1930s, and that it presents no adequate solution to the problems of our contemporary world. (shrink)

The obscured Thomas precessionof the special theory of relativity (STR) has been soared into prominence by exposing the mathematical structure, called a gyrogroup,to which it gives rise [A. A. Ungar, Amer. J. Phys.59,824 (1991)], and the role that it plays in the study of Lorentz groups [A. A. Ungar, Amer. J. Phys.60,815 (1992); A. A. Ungar, J. Math. Phys.35,1408 (1994); A. A. Ungar, J. Math. Phys.35,1881 (1994)]. Thomas gyrationresults from the abstraction of Thomas precession.As such, its (...) study sheds light on relativistic velocity spaces and their symmetries which are concealed in Thomas precession. In order to uncover new properties of relativistic gyrogroups, we employ in this article the group theoretic concepts of divisible groupsand two-torsion free groupsto construct midpointsin gyrogroups. Systems of successive midpoints then describe straight gyrolinesand suggest a new, natural distance function that involves a Thomas gyration. These, in turn, reveal a new, interesting geometry that underlies relativistic velocity spaces. In this resulting gyrogeometrythe straight gyrolines form geodesics under a distance function which turns out to be the Poincaré hyperbolic distance function relaxed by a Thomas gyration. These geodesics do obey the parallel axiom of Euclidean geometry. Ironically, (i) attempts to understand the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry gave rise to hyperbolic geometry in which the parallel postulate disappears;(ii) hyperbolic geometry gave rise to Einstein's STR; (iii) Einstein's STR established the bizarre and counterintuitive relativistic effect called Thomas precession, the abstraction of which is called Thomas gyration; and (iv) Thomas gyration now repairs in this article the Poincaré distance function of hyperbolic geometry to the point where the parallel postulate reappears. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An examination of contemporary publications in the philosophy of education reveals that the authority of the teacher is being eroded. As teachers derive their authority from the democratic state and its compulsory education laws, the undermining of their authority indicates the undermining of the authority of the democratic state and its laws. A comparison between Plato and Dewey from this point of view reveals that this state of affairs is the upshot of the collision between the principle of authority (...) and the principle of liberty, and that this collision constitutes the basic problem of democracy as well as of education for democracy. The challenge to contemporary education is consequently that of exploring ways leading to the rehabilitation of the authority of the teacher. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 6, Page 50-52, June 2012.

The relativistic velocity composition paradox of Mocanu and its resolution are presented. The paradox, which rests on the bizarre and counterintuitive non-communtativity of the relativistic velocity composition operation, when applied to noncollinear admissible velocities, led Mocanu to claim that there are “some difficulties within the framework of relativistic electrodynamics.” The paradox is resolved in this article by means of the Thomas rotation, shedding light on the role played by composite velocities in special relativity, as opposed to the role they play (...) in Galilean relativity. (shrink)

Gyrogroup theory [A. A. Ungar, Found. Phys. 27, 881–951 (1997)] enables the study of the algebra of Einstein's addition to be guided by analogies shared with the algebra of vector addition. The capability of gyrogroup theory to capture analogies is demonstrated in this article by exposing the relativistic composite-velocity reciprocity principle. The breakdown of commutativity in the Einstein velocity addition ⊕ of relativistically admissible velocities seemingly gives rise to a corresponding breakdown of the relativistic composite-velocity reciprocity principle, since seemingly (...) (i) on one hand, the velocity reciprocal to the composite velocity u⊕v is −(u⊕v) and (ii) on the other hand, it is (−v)⊕(−u). But (iii) −(u⊕v)≠(−v)⊕(−u). We remove the confusion in (i), (ii), and (iii) by employing the gyrocommutative gyrogroup structure of Einstein's addition and, subsequently, present the relativistic composite-velocity reciprocity principle with the Thomas rotation that it involves. (shrink)