_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 1 - 33 This article reinterprets Maimonides’ theory of creation and revelation by focusing upon the relationship between belief in creation and the affirmation of miracle and law described in _Guide_ II :25. Focusing upon Maimonides’ use of inference to describe creation and revelation, I re-evaluate Maimonides’ account as an instance of inferential reasoning. That is, Maimonides makes use of, rather than proves, the _implicit_ norms of creation and revelation in their _explicit_ function (...) of legal reasoning. Thus, I suggest that Maimonides’ emphasis upon inferential judgment in justifying law is a defense of creation and revelation as rules of reasoning. (shrink)

Religion, reason, and the enchanted public sphere -- Minor protest(ant)s: Cohen and German-Jewish liberalism -- The dialectic of enchantment: science, religion, and secular reasoning -- Rights, religion, and race: Cohen's ethical socialism and the specter of anti-Semitism -- Enchanted reasoning: self-reflexive religion and minority -- Some minor reflections of enchantment.

Hegel is usually regarded as advocate for the retribution theory. This article attempts to correct the misunderstanding through detailed consideration of his notes of philosophy of right, which add up to proposal of substitution of capital punishment. According to Hegel, the punishment can be imposed as the second coercion, only if the crime was committed as the first coercion. This coercion is self-contradicted, inasmuch as it is conceptually the existence of free will of criminal, which encroach the existence of free (...) will of all. This contradiction becomes realized and sublated through the retribution as the second coercion. In this respect, the retributive punishment can be counted as the right containing unlawfulness. However, the object of retribution can be nothing else but the external existence of free criminal will, because the will or thinking itself is ontologically unable to be coerced. Therefore, the empirical consideration of the external regulation upon the crime should be inevitably given. But the empirical determination of punishment cannot also by any means correspond to the concept of retribution adequately, on the ontological ground that there is no individual, which realizes the conceptual universal totally. For that reason, the culture of people, which implies the retributive justice and self-certainty of society, plays a significant role in the determination of punishment. Eventually, Hegel comes to the conclusion that the securer society is, the more individually damage is considered, therefore the milder punishment becomes. To this can be supplemented the other ground that the authentic retribution should guarantee the possibility of durational self-reflection on the universal foundation of coexistence, thus exclude the capital punishment. (shrink)

S. Leyla Gürkan’s The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation is a bold attempt to trace the concept of the election of Israel from its Biblical and early Rabbinic development to the early modern and post-holocaust periods. Written as the history of an idea, the common thread tying the work together is the account and analysis of how this single, sometimes thorny, question of “chosenness” has animated Jewish conceptions of identity throughout its history. The author’s focus on this (...) idea serves as the motivation of the work to describe how “the idea of chosenness . . . is the raison d’être of the Jewish religion as well as the Jewish people” (p. 1). The author describes the question of .. (shrink)

Hegel is neither a worshiper of the war nor remains a realist who sees right-philosophically in its inescapability. This paper seeks to explain, in the light of his philosophy of history, the reasonable necessity of overcoming the war. According to Hegel, war, if inevitable, is desirable only as separate from the civic spheres and without personal hatred, but it has right-philosophically the significance of being the ethical moment in realizing the ideality of state unity. But this realization must also be (...) based, in international relation, on the principle eligibility of the universal world spirit. This paper intends to show that the intellectual struggle for such eligibility leads to the search for an abstract, limited war without physical annihilation. (shrink)

With the advancement of medical technology, various life-sustaining treatments are available at the end of life. Older adults should be encouraged to establish their end-of-life treatment preferences (ELTP) while they are physically and mentally able to do so. The purpose of this study was to explore ELTP among older adults and to compare those preferences in a subset of individuals who had reported their ELTP in a survey completed the previous year. This was a descriptive study of 191 older adults (...) living in a continuing care retirement community. Approximately half of the participants did not want cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to be put on a respirator, or to receive dialysis. The findings in this study suggest that many older adults do not want aggressive interventions at the end of life, but choose rather those measures that will keep them comfortable. Moreover, treatment choices may change over time. Health care providers should initiate discussions about ELTP at regular intervals (yearly) to assist older adults in dictating their end-of-life care. (shrink)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.