This is a comprehensive study of the philosophy of Maimonides by the noted 20th-century rabbinic scholar and thinker, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Based on a complete set of notes on Rabbi Soloveitchik's lectures, it constitutes a major contribution to our knowledge of both Maimonides and Soloveitchik.

The question addressed by this book is what, if anything, stoic ethics would be like today if stoicism had had a continuous history to the present day as a plausible and coherent set of philosophical commitments and methods. The book answers that question by arguing that most of the ancient doctrines of Stoic ethics remain defensible today, at least when ancient Stoicism's cosmological commitments are replaced by modern scientific ones.

This book is a history of the idea of convention, the roles it played in the formative stages of English and Continental literary theory and in the development ...

This book argues for adopting a new account of the circumstances of justice ("the habilitation framework") for philosophical theories of basic justice. It proposes a concept of basic health as a metric for such theories, and healthy agency as a target for them. It does not, however, propose a specific distributive rule or set of distributive principles. Nor does it propose a specific type of theory to pursue (e.g., utilitarian, contractarian, etc.). The book is thus meant to be largely theory-independent (...) respect to standard normative theories. (shrink)

Ever since Greek antiquity "disembodied knowledge" has often been taken as synonymous with "objective truth." Yet we also have very specific mental images of the kinds of bodies that house great minds--the ascetic philosopher versus the hearty surgeon, for example. Does truth have anything to do with the belly? What difference does it make to the pursuit of knowledge whether Einstein rode a bicycle, Russell was randy, or Darwin flatulent? Bringing body and knowledge into such intimate contact is occasionally seen (...) as funny, sometimes as enraging, and more often just as pointless. Vividly written and well illustrated, Science Incarnate offers concrete historical answers to such skeptical questions about the relationships between body, mind, and knowledge. Focusing on the seventeenth century to the present, Science Incarnate explores how intellectuals sought to establish the value and authority of their ideas through public displays of their private ways of life. Patterns of eating, sleeping, exercising, being ill, and having (or avoiding) sex, as well as the marks of gender and bodily form, were proof of the presence or absence of intellectual virtue, integrity, skill, and authority. Intellectuals examined in detail include René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Ada Lovelace. Science Incarnate is at once very funny and deeply serious, addressing issues of crucial importance to present-day discussions about the nature of knowledge and how it is produced. It incorporates much that will interest cultural and social historians, historians of science and medicine, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. (shrink)

Though there are good arguments against physician participation in executions, physicians should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether they will participate, and professional medical organizations should not flatly destroy the careers of those who do.

The article explores the influence of unproven specificity of pathogenesis manifested in clinical psychiatry and research. A selected literature review of studies attempting to identify a biological marker is presented. To date, the search for a biological marker to establish a psychiatric diagnosis has been unsuccessful. Clinical settings and programs are described which seem to be driven by psychological issues, one such example being the search for villains. Thus, specific assumptions about etiology affect therapy technique and treatment planning and may (...) be disadvantageous to patient care. Biological and psychological development in all of its phases is subject to a diverse range of perturbations, intrinsic as well as extrinsic. A flexible, balanced view is called for before specificity is extended to general theories, which, in turn, affect therapy and treatment settings. (shrink)

If some aspects of human behavior are too murky to see into, others are too close and transparent to examine; one that has eluded both scientists and philosophers is how speakers of natural languages make words and expressions refer to specific objects in the world. Marshalling his expertise in philosophy, computers, and system science (State U. of.

The neoliberal-inspired “shock therapy” policies were designed to allow efficiency considerations to shape the new capitalist economies. Most experts theorized that these policies would enable postcommunist countries to close the gap with the West. After more than a decade, this prediction has been falsified. Fieldwork in 25 Russian firms demonstrates that the neoliberal prescription of mass privatization creates shocks that make successful enterprise restructuring almost impossible. Instead, most firms lower their technological level of production and retreat to nonmarket activity to (...) survive. The result is a poorer economy with less growth potential and thus increased divergence with the West. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to identify and explain a religious paradigm in Targum Qohelet (TgQoh). Targum Qohelet is dated to a period between 500 CE and 1101 CE. This study concludes that the most probable setting for this Targum was the beit midrash (the house of study). A paradigmatic research approach is used to identify the range of translation components to explain the translation method employed in TgQoh and the rationale behind it. This research approach reveals how the (...) translator(s) used their interpretative ability to create a completely different thought-world when compared with the original Hebrew Text. Various subparadigms emerge as a network of connected religious beliefs to form a cogent systematic rabbinic theology of a perfect world order to replace the pessimism of the Hebrew base text. The Aramaic version reflects a complete solution to the existential problems raised by Biblical Qohelet. It seeks to provide humankind with guidelines for creating a ‘perfect world’ both on earth and in the afterlife. The use of a paradigmatic analysis based on the concept of a ‘perfect world’ provides an ideal model for analysing the translation strategy of TgQoh and understanding its method of rendering. Contribution: The application of paradigmatic methodology bridges the gap between the relatively secular nature of the Hebrew version of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) and the overwhelmingly and inescapable theological forms of the Aramaic targum. The paradigms in the Aramaic translation identify how the targum applied rabbinic ideology to explain the meanings that lies behind the original Hebrew text of Qohelet. The paradigms, when taken together reveal how the cynical nature of Hebrew Qohelet was changed into a rabbinical guide for righteous living, here described as ‘perfect world’. (shrink)

Et si les scientifiques avaient trop compliqué leur processus de démonstration, la fameuse "démonstration"? Et si la démonstration, peu concluante, s'embourbait simplement parce qu'elle relève en vrai d'un raisonnement paralogique psychiatrique tel que celui que l'on rencontre dans le discours du paranoïaque, discours logique certes mais qui part d'un postulat faux? Nous sous-entendons ici que cette hypothèse est fort probable. Et par suite, l'inquiétude et la confusion seront au rendez-vous de cette démarche, de même que cette impression de ne jamais (...) arriver au bout de la description du phénomène de la vie et de la physique. Bien que la totalité des pièces du puzzle semblent présentes, comment procéder pour les assembler? La science s'est séparée depuis belle lurette de la philosophie, et c'est ainsi qu'elle a pu se targuer de porter la dénomination de "science"! Osera-t-elle recevoir des leçons de la philosophie dès lors qu'elle s'est érigée en son exacte contraposée? (shrink)

How is it that sounds from the mouth or marks on a page—which by themselves are nothing like things or events in the world—can be world-disclosive in an automatic manner? In this fascinating and important book, Lawrence J. Hatab presents a new vocabulary for Heidegger’s early phenomenology of being-in-the-world and applies it to the question of language. He takes language to be a mode of dwelling, in which there is an immediate, direct disclosure of meanings, and sketches an extensive (...) picture of proto-phenomenology, how it revises the posture of philosophy, and how this posture applies to the nature of language. Representational theories are not rejected but subordinated to a presentational account of immediate disclosure in concrete embodied life. The book critically addresses standard theories of language, such that typical questions in the philosophy of language are revised in a manner that avoids binary separations of language and world, speech and cognition, theory and practise, realism and idealism, internalism and externalism. (shrink)

This essay explores two ideas that have recently played an important role in discourse about the American constitutional order. The first idea has emerged from the revival of civic republicanism. The republican revival has focused our attention on the classical conception of civic virtue. Our basic social arrangements ought to nourish a citizenry with the characteristics of mind and will that promote human flourishing. The second idea, expressed in critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence, is that we have an obligation (...) as a society and as scholars to attend to excluded voices. The juxtaposition of these two themes offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between classical philosophy and the American constitutional order. Civic republicanism is a complex set of ideas that has developed over the course of two millennia; understanding the republican revival requires a recognition that there are many strands in republican thought-that republicanism is itself a contested concept. In order to untangle the strands, I will examine classical moral and political philosophy, especially the work of Aristotle and Machiavelli, in relation to the work of the architects of the republican revival, including Frank Michelman, Suzanna Sherry, Cass Sunstein, and others. (shrink)

The present book is a sequel to Ephraim Chamiel's two previous works The Middle Way and The Dual Truth-studies dedicated to the "middle" trend in modern Jewish thought, that is, those positions that sought to combine tradition and modernity, and offered a variety of approaches for contending with the tension between science and revelation and between reason and religion. The present book explores contemporary Jewish thinkers who have adopted one of these integrated approaches-namely the dialectical approach. Some of these thinkers (...) maintain that the aforementioned tension-the rift within human consciousness between intellect and emotion, mind and heart-can be mended. Others, however, think that the dialectic between the two poles of this tension is inherently irresolvable, a view reminiscent of the medieval "dual truth" approach. Some thinkers are unclear on this point, and those who study them debate whether or not they successfully resolved the tension and offered a means of reconciliation. The author also offers his views on these debates. This book explores the dialectical approaches of Rav Kook, Rav Soloveitchik, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Samuel Hugo Bergman, Leo Strauss, Ernst Simon, Emil Fackenheim, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, his uncle Isaac Breuer, Tamar Ross, Rabbi Shagar, Moshe Meir, Micah Goodman and Elchanan Shilo. It also discusses the interpretations of these thinkers offered by scholars such as Michael Rosenak, Avinoam Rosenak, Eliezer Schweid, Aviezer Ravitzky, Avi Sagi, Binyamin Ish-Shalom, Ehud Luz, Dov Schwartz, Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, Lawrence Kaplan, and Haim Rechnitzer. The author questions some of these approaches and offers ideas of his own. This study concludes that many scholars bore witness to the dialectical tension between reason and revelation; only some believed that a solution was possible. That being said, and despite the paradoxical nature of the dual truth approach (which maintains that two contradictory truths exist and we must live with both of them in this world until a utopian future or the advent of the Messiah), increasing numbers of thinkers today are accepting it. In doing so, they are eschewing delusional and apologetic views such as the identicality and compartmental approaches that maintain that tensions and contradictions are unacceptable. (shrink)

An evaluation of the methodology and perspectives of modern science explains how discoveries in the physical sciences require and anticipate a revolutionary, philosophical interpretation of reality.

The First Preface to Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason contains various characterizations of the distinction between biblical and philosophical theology. Similar characterizations are also found in the Preface to The Conflict of the Faculties. In both, Kant warns the philosopher against trespassing into the purview of the biblical theologian. Yet, in the actual body of both texts, we find numerous occasions where Kant deviates from the rules he initially articulates. The purpose of this paper is to identify (...) these rules, discuss their apparent violations, and consider the implications of this divergence. (shrink)