ḥeleḳ 1-3. Toldot Bet Hilel -- ḥeleḳ 4. [without special title].

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates (...) the applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

RésuméTechnê iatrikêde Galien a été traduit en hébreu trois fois. Deux fois dans le midi, autour de l'an 1199: d'abord, à partir de la version latine de Constantine l'Africain, par un médecin anonyme qui utilisait le pseudonyme “Doeg l’Édomite”; et une seconde fois de l'arabe, par Samuel Ibn Tibbon à Béziers, laVorlageétant maintenant la version arabe de Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq (al-Ṣināʿa al-ṣaġīra), accompagnée par le commentaire de ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān. (La paternité de Samuel Ibn Tibbon de cette traduction a été (...) contestée, mais elle est établie dans l'article de Gad Freudenthal dans ce numéro d’ASP.) Une troisième traduction, encore une fois du latin et comprenant le commentaire d'Ibn Riḍwān, a été réalisée par Hillel ben Samuel à Rome à la fin du XIIIesiècle, mais elle n'entre pas dans notre sujet.Nous présentons leTegniet décrivons son histoire. Puis nous posons la question pourquoi cet ouvrage a été traduit en hébreu deux fois exactement au même moment et dans la même région. Nous montrons que les deux traducteurs ont répondu à un besoin des médecins juifs lisant seulement l'hébreu. Doeg réalise sa traduction dans le cadre de son vaste projet de mise à disposition en traduction hébraïque de la plus grande partie du corpus de l’école de Salerne. Samuel Ibn Tibbon, pour sa part, a traduit leTegniavec le commentaire d'Ibn Riḍwān parce que, après avoir été médecin, il évoluait graduellement vers la vocation d'un traducteur de l'arabe en hébreu d’œuvres philosophiques et ce texte médico-philosophique était en adéquation avec cette évolution d'un médecin avec des intérêts philosophiques vers un scientifique-philosophe. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a biologist, but the impact of his work has been perhaps stronger and more persistent in philosophy and the humanities than in the natural sciences. As one of the contributors to this book observes, Uexküll's conception of biology is “more at home among the disciplines composing the Geisteswissenschaften [humanities] than those included in the Naturwissenschaften [sciences], insofar as Uexküll's biology put Verstehen [understanding] before Erklären [explaining].” Uexküll began his career as an experimentalist of a “proto-behaviorist” (...) kind but came rapidly to be dissatisfied with the reduction of physiology to action-and-reaction chains. He argued that the animal-as-machine, the model that lies behind behaviorism, cannot be the starting point of biology. The relation between cause and effect in a machine is direct: the wings of a windmill, say, transfer their movement to a cog even if no one is there to perceive the transfer. In contrast, in the realm of the living, “a stimulus must be ‘noticed’ by a subject” to have any effect. Thus, Uexküll claims, “the first task of [the biologist] consists in seeking out the animal's perception signs”—in searching for what, in its surroundings, an animal perceives and of what it takes notice.Uexküll defined surroundings (Umgebung) as the whole physical reality in the vicinity of an animal, whereas by the term environment (Umwelt) he meant only that part of an animal's surroundings that it perceives. Given Uexküll's understanding of biology as the study of signs of perception (Merkmale), it is no surprise that his work has been a crucial source of inspiration for semiotics. Only one chapter of this new book is devoted to that topic, since Uexküll's presence in the field of semiotics (and in biosemiotics more particularly) is already well documented and analyzed in many publications, whereas his impact on the field of philosophy has been less studied (Brett Buchanan's Onto-Ethologies is, to date, perhaps the best study of that kind). Martin Heidegger was not the first to import the Umwelt theory into philosophy (Max Scheller, Helmuth Plessner, and Ernst Cassirer did so before him, and to each of them a chapter is devoted), but Heidegger is the most famous. It was by reworking an example of Uexküll's—“the rock on which the lizard lies is not given to the lizard as rock, in such a way that it could inquire into its mineralogical constitution for example”—that Heidegger characterized the divergent ways in which animals and humans approach the world. The former can use the things of the world, but humans are uniquely capable of conceiving things as independent of their use of them. We have no more direct access to our physical surroundings than other animals do, but, Heidegger held, we are at least able to imagine our surroundings and the things that fill them as independent of us (and eventually to examine them in the way that a mineralogist examines stones).Thus, Heidegger used Uexküll to set out an “ontological difference” between humans and animals. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, made use of Uexküll to advance a nondualistic ontology in which “the affects [that animals] are capable of” is given as the definition of bodies—a definition, he emphasized, “no less valid for us, for humans, than for animals.” Other philosophers whose understanding and use of Uexküll are examined in detail include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Hans Blumenberg, and Giorgio Agamben; in addition to the complementary chapter on Uexküll and semiotics, already mentioned, there is one on his place in hermeneutics and one on the influence of Kant. The final chapter concerns the remaking of Uexküll by artists. In this way, this collection of studies offers a varied, detailed, well-structured, and engaging presentation of one of the most original biologists of the last century. As a whole, this book is an example of philosophy at its best—which is: when it specifies, pluralizes, and intensifies the thoughts and works of others. (shrink)

The daring idea that convention - human decision - lies at the root both of necessary truths and much of empirical science reverberates through twentieth-century philosophy, constituting a revolution comparable to Kant's Copernican revolution. This book provides a comprehensive study of Conventionalism. Drawing a distinction between two conventionalist theses, the under-determination of science by empirical fact, and the linguistic account of necessity, Yemima Ben-Menahem traces the evolution of both ideas to their origins in Poincaré's geometric conventionalism. She argues that the (...) radical extrapolations of Poincaré's ideas by later thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Quine, and Carnap, eventually led to the decline of conventionalism. This book provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century philosophy. Many of the major themes of contemporary philosophy emerge in this book as arising from engagement with the challenge of conventionalism. (shrink)

This nation’s obesity epidemic is hardly a laughing matter. Approximately 300,000 Americans die from obesity-related causes each year, and without corrective measures, obesity may soon be responsible for as many deaths as cigarette smoking. Sixty-one percent of adults are overweight or obese, and the cost of obesity for the year 2000 was estimated to be 117 billion dollars.In Pelman v. McDmalds, a case decided in September 2003, a federal judge dismissed an amended complaint that attempted to hold McDonalds liable for (...) its customers’ obesity-related illnesses. While many argue that such litigation is frivolous and that the plaintiffs did not deserve direct compensation for their injuries, the debate has largely overlooked the important question raised by these cases - who should pay for the enormous financial strain that obesity places on America’s health care system? Although the courtroom may not be the appropriate forum to deal with this issue, the litigation has undoubtedly brought a great deal of much-needed attention to a vexatious social problem. (shrink)

In the mid-nineteenth century George Boole formulated his ‘conditions of possible experience’. These are equations and ineqaulities that the relative frequencies of events must satisfy. Some of Boole's conditions have been rediscovered in more recent years by physicists, including Bell inequalities, Clauser Horne inequalities, and many others. In this paper, the nature of Boole's conditions and their relation to propositional logic is explained, and the puzzle associated with their violation by quantum frequencies is investigated in relation to a variety of (...) approaches to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. * While preparing this paper for publication I have learnt of the untimely death of Professor J. S. Bell, and I wish to dedicate the paper to his memory. This research was undertaken while I spent a sabbatical leave at Wolfson College, and the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Cambridge. I would like to thank Michael Redhead and Jeremy Butterfield for their hospitality and for helpful discussions. A first draft of this paper has been distributed among the participants of the conference 'Einstein in Context' which was held in Israel, in April 1990.1 have benefited from the comments of many colleagues. I would like to thank in particular Arthur Fine who enlightened me on the prism models, David Albert. Maya Bar-Hillel. Yemima Ben-Menachem, Mara Beller. Simon Saunders, and Mark Steiner. This research is partially supported by the Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University. (shrink)

L'année 2006 coïncide avec le sixième centenaire de la mort d'Ibn Khaldûn. Figure marquante et attachante de la culture arabe classique, ce philosophe de l'histoire fut principalement le lecteur critique de phénomènes socio-économiques récurrents et endémiques, qui sont encore, même sous de nouvelles formes, parmi les causes de notre retard historique : segmentarisme et esprit de corps tribal, despotisme, pauvreté et corruption, etc. En tirant les conséquences de son analyse de l'œuvre khaldûnienne, l'auteur pense que le désir de modernité dans (...) le monde arabe d'aujourd'hui a besoin, pour s'exprimer et se réaliser, de la médiation démocratique, entendue dans sa double articulation politico-économique. Cette médiation ne permet pas seulement de faire l'histoire de l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme, de ses effets et ses retombées, mais aussi de penser sa fin. Par le seul fait que l'œuvre khaldûniennne balise de bout en bout le parcours du Maghreb précolonial, elle mérite notre sollicitation et notre attention. Et même si par bonheur cette région parvenait à rompre effectivement avec sa genèse médiévale, ladite œuvre restera pour les historiens et les penseurs une source d'information et de méditation intarissable de premier plan. (shrink)