This work is comprised of personal essays by some of the most noted Holocaust educators working in or with Holocaust museums, resource centers, or educational organizations across the globe.

The Material Culture of the Northern Sea Peoples in Israel. By Ephraim Stern. Harvard Semitic Museum Publications, Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, vol. 5. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2013. Pp. ix + 74, illus. $29.50.

The authors of this volume — all of them recognized representatives of a wide range of academic disciplines — agree that Locke’s work must have had a considerable influence both on English and German literature and the visual arts of Great Britain, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the perspective of interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, the essays presented here deal with Locke as a source of ideas for Archibald Alison, John Constable, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Timotheus (...) Hermes, William Hogarth, Immanuel Kant, Martin Knutzen, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, George Lillo, Edward Moore, Johann Gottwerth Müller, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Richardson, John Ruskin, Joseph Spence, Laurence Sterne, J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Whately, among others. (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)

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)

This paper investigates some classical oppositional categories, like synthetic versus analytic, posterior versus prior, imagination versus grammar, metaphor versus hermeneutics, metaphysics versus observation, innovation versus routine, and image versus sound, and the role they play in epistemology and philosophy of science. The epistemological framework of _objective cognitive constructivism_ is of special interest in these investigations. Oppositional relations are formally represented using algebraic lattice structures like the cube and the hexagon of opposition, with applications in the contexts of modern color theory, (...) Kantian philosophy, Jungian psychology, and linguistics. (shrink)

Plotinus’s theory of dual selfhood has ethical norms built into it, all of which derive from the ontological superiority of the higher (or undescended) soul in us overthe body-soul compound. The moral life, as it is presented in the Enneads, is a life of self-perfection, devoted to the care of the higher self. Such a conception of morality is prone to strike modern readers as either ‘egoistic’ or unduly austere. If there is no doubt that Plotinus’s ethics is exceptionally austere, (...) it will be argued below that it is not ‘egoistic.’ To that effect, the following questions will be addressed: Are the virtues, civic as well as purificatory, mere means to Plotinus’s metaphysically conceived ethical goal? To what extent must the lower self abnegate itself so as to enable the higher self to ascend to Intellect and beyond? And if self-perfection lies at the centre of the Plotinian moral life, is there any conceptual room left in it for other-regarding norms of conduct? A close reading of selected passages from Plotinus’s tractate I.2[19] On Virtues and tractate VI.8[39] On Free Will and the Will of the One will, it is claimed, bring elements of answer to these questions. (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)

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ :287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is (...) an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility—as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change—provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen. (shrink)

Tree-Structured Readings of the Tractatus : I argue that the numbering system of the Tractatus lets us see how it was constructed, in two closely related senses of that term. First, it tells us a great deal about the genesis of the book, for the numbering system was used to assemble and rearrange a series of drafts, as recorded in MS 104. Second, it helps us understand the structure of the published book, as cryptically summarized in the opening footnote. I (...) also discuss an unpublished letter from Anscombe to von Wright from 1948 which contains the very first sketch of a tree-structured reading, and what I believe is Stenius’s response to Anscombe’s proposal. The paper critically evaluates previous work on tree-structured readings and contends that we need to read the Tractatus in both the number order used in the published book and the tree order that Wittgenstein used to draft it. It also considers some of the main ways of turning this complex branching structure into a linear, printed text, and so serves as an introduction to the three tree-structured editions of the Tractatus that accompany the original English-language publication of this paper in NWR 11 (the German text, and the translations by Ogden & Ramsey and Pears & McGuinness). (shrink)

The study addresses the issue of the Christian scholarly interest in the Hebrew language since the rise of Humanism. Though the main focus of that interest in Hebrew grammar and vocabulary was to get a better understanding of the “Old Testament”, the subsequent reformation fostered the notion that a better knowledge of both the Hebrew language and the Jewish culture, can promote the conversion of Jews to Christianity. The article inspects possible other underlying motives and discourses behind the translation of (...) Hebrew and Old Yiddish blessings into Latin as the most important lingua sacra, taking into account twentieth century theories about power and hegemony by Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. The study examines the chapter about Jewish greetings and blessings in the original dictionary Šemot Devarim – Nomenclatura Hebraica Autore Helia Levita (Isny, 1542) and the revised translation as Nomenclator Eliae Levitae Germani by Johannes Drusius and son (Franeker, 1652). Also included are transliterated editions of both texts, with translations. (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)

An account of the distinction between singular and general propositions should reflect the core ideas that have motivated the distinction. Those core ideas can be appreciated independently of many commitments regarding the metaphysics of propositions, but theorists with differing views on the latter have given quite different explanations of what it is for a proposition to be singular or general. Many of those explanations turn out not to reflect the core ideas adequately after all, either by misclassifying certain propositions or (...) by failing to be sufficiently informative. A more satisfactory account can be formulated by more directly elaborating on the background ideas motivating the distinction. The resulting account not only does better than its competitors, but is compatible with various views on the metaphysics of propositions. (shrink)

Anti-Intellectualists about know-how , following Ryle, hold that knowing how to do something is simply having the ability to do it. With qualifications, I defend this traditional view. The central motivation is drawn from observations about what is involved in learning to do something. Two sorts of ability are distinguished and the thesis is defended against putative counterexamples.

The Intellectualist thesis that know-how is a kind of propositional knowledge faces a simple problem: For any proposition p, it seems that one could know p without knowing how to do the activity in question. For example, it seems that one could know that w is a way to swim even if one didn't know how to swim oneself. In this paper I argue that this “sufficiency problem” cannot be adequately addressed by appealing to practical modes of presentation.

Inauguration speech at chair number 18 of the Brasilian Academy of Philosophy.

On the background of voluntary assurances made by corporations in line with the assertions in their corporate social responsibility disclosures, we investigate which types of firms will obtain an independent certification of their corporate social responsibility disclosures. The study is based on firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) from 2015 to 2019. Deviating from traditional regression approaches, we employ machine learning techniques and show that machine learning techniques obtain superior performance compared to traditional logistic regression at predicting the (...) likelihood of corporate social responsibility assurance by a corporation. The result also shows that large firms with high CSR score, independent board, highly leveraged and belonging to finance industry are the most likely to assure their CSR disclosures. (shrink)