Developers are often the engine behind the creation and implementation of new technologies, including in the artificial intelligence surge that is currently underway. In many cases these new technologies introduce significant risk to affected stakeholders; risks that can be reduced and mitigated by such a dominant party. This is fully recognized by texts that analyze risks in the current AI transformation, which suggest voluntary adoption of ethical standards and imposing ethical standards via regulation and oversight as tools to compel developers (...) to reduce such risks. However, what these texts usually sidestep is the question of how aware developers are to the risks they are creating with these new AI technologies, and what their attitudes are towards such risks. This paper asks to rectify this gap in research, by analyzing an ongoing case study. Focusing on six Israeli AI startups in the field of radiology, I carry out a content analysis of their online material in order to examine these companies’ stances towards the potential threat their automated tools pose to patient safety and to the work-standing of healthcare professionals. Results show that these developers are aware of the risks their AI products pose, but tend to deny their own role in the technological transformation and dismiss or downplay the risks to stakeholders. I conclude by tying these findings back to current risk-reduction recommendations with regards to advanced AI technologies, and suggest which of them hold more promise in light of developers’ attitudes. (shrink)

This book demonstrates that we need not choose between seeing so-called Presocratic thinkers as rational philosophers or as religious sages. In particular, it rethinks fundamentally the emergence of systematic epistemology and reflection on speculative inquiry in Hesiod, Xenophanes and Parmenides. Shaul Tor argues that different forms of reasoning, and different models of divine disclosure, play equally integral, harmonious and mutually illuminating roles in early Greek epistemology. Throughout, the book relates these thinkers to their religious, literary and historical surroundings. It (...) is thus also, and inseparably, a study of poetic inspiration, divination, mystery initiation, metempsychosis and other early Greek attitudes to the relations and interactions between mortal and divine. The engagements of early philosophers with such religious attitudes present us with complex combinations of criticisms and creative appropriations. Indeed, the early milestones of philosophical epistemology studied here themselves reflect an essentially theological enterprise and, as such, one aspect of Greek religion. (shrink)

Introduction -- Closed mindedness in movies -- Failed alternatives to optional thinking -- Optional thinking in movies -- Conclusion.

A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920. By Henry Abramson, xxi+255 pp. $36.95/£24.50/€36.95 cloth; $19.95/£13.50/€19.95 paper.

This book provides the reader with a theoretical and practical understanding of two health care delivery models: the patient/child centred care and family-centred care. Both are fundamental to caring for children in healthcare organizations. The authors address their application in a variety of paediatric healthcare contexts, as well as the ethical and legal issues they raise. Each model is increasingly pursued as a vehicle for guiding the delivery of health care in the best interests of children. Such models of health (...) care delivery shape health care policies, programs, facility design, resource allocation decisions and day-to-day interactions among patients, families, physicians and other health care professionals. To maximize the health and ethical benefits these models offer, there must be shared understanding of what the models entail, as well as the ethical and legal synergies and tensions they can create. This book is a valuable resource for paediatricians, nurses, trainees, graduate students, practitioners of ethics and health policy. (shrink)

This article argues that Empedocles’ trust in Strife (DK31 B115.14 = LM22 D10.14) is not, as the prevailing interpretation has it, only a past misjudgement and failure. Rather, trust in Strife still, and to his own lament, infects Empedocles’ mind and informs his life. This detail then offers a fresh perspective on Empedocles’ self-conception and on how, through the daimōn’s cosmic peregrinations, Empedocles raises and pursues questions of agency and responsibility. Furthermore, it sheds light on Empedocles’ understanding of his own (...) ethical standing: common assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not see himself as an unqualifiedly successful embodiment of his own ideals. (shrink)

t. 1. Les religions de l'Inde, et Bulletins des religions de l'Inde (1880-1885) -- t. 2. Bulletins des religions de l'Inde (1889-1902) -- t. 3. Comptes rendus et notices (1872-1886) -- t. 4. Comptes rendus et notices (1887-1898) -- t. 5. Comptes rendus et notices (1899-1911). Bibiliographie. Index général.

This article investigates Levinas’s readings of Plato and Descartes in Totality and Infinity, in relation to the question of teaching. Levinas identifies Plato’s Form of the Good and Descartes’s idea of the infinite as two models for his own conception of the Other. Yet while Levinas lauds Descartes’s theory of teaching, he is highly critical of Plato’s. Plato’s theory of teaching as recollection or maieutics is judged by Levinas to display merely the circular return of the Same to its own (...) interiority. In contrast, the Cartesian God supplies the idea of the infinite to a subject incapable of generating it for itself, offering an account of teaching that respects the Other’s transcendent exteriority. I nonetheless argue for the possibility of a rapprochement between Levinas and Plato with regard to teaching. Ultimately, this serves to bolster Levinas’s own theory of teaching, for which both Plato and Descartes can rightly serve as fitting predecessors. (shrink)

This article tracks Derrida's readings of Kant and Husserl as they explore the relation between, on the one hand, faith and knowledge, and on the other, theory and practice. Kant had to limit the scope of theoretical knowledge in order to make room for a practical faith in the rational ideas of the unconditioned, generated through the unconditionality of the moral law. Husserl deployed the figure of ‘the Idea in the Kantian sense’ at those crucial moments in the exposition of (...) his transcendental phenomenology where the unconditioned comes into play, a problematic strategy that Derrida judges to have revealed the limits of the phenomenological project. While Husserl's call for an unconditional theoretical and practical renewal of faith in reason appears to offer him an out, Husserlian faith is ultimately dependent on an untenable circularity, to which the Kantian variety also succumbs. Only Derrida's unconditional gift of faith can save the honour of reason from its mortal crisis, but in a manner that is itself not wholly a matter of reason. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia examines the life choices of two Jews who loved Christianity. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, born into an ultra-Orthodox, nineteenth-century rabbinic dynasty in Lithuania, spent much of his life writing a Hebrew commentary on the Gospels in order to document and argue for the symmetry or symbiosis that he perceived between Judaism and Christianity. Oswald Rufeisen, from a twentieth-century secular Zionist background in Poland, converted to Catholicism during World War II, became a monk, (...) and attempted to immigrate to Israel as a Jew in 1958. Rufeisen, while permitted to move to Israel to join a Carmelite monastery in Haifa, was denied the right to immediate citizenship of Israel which the Law of Return guarantees to all bona fide Jews. And this particular Soloveitchik has largely been forgotten, given the limits of Jewish interest in the New Testament and of Christian attention to rabbinic literature. This article explores the complex and vexing questions that the careers of these two men raise about the elusive distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the Jewish religion and Jewish national identity. (shrink)

This article reconstructs and evaluates a debate between Pippin and Žižek over the proper interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in relation to Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. Both Pippin and Žižek agree that Vertigo exemplifies Hegelian reconciliation: Scottie exhibits Hegel’s reconciliatory “negation of negation” when he realizes that his lost love Madeleine had really been Judy all along, thereby losing his original loss. Yet Pippin and Žižek disagree on the precise significance of the concept of reconciliation both for the film and for (...) the contemporary world. Žižek argues for a revolutionary reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must make a revolutionary break from the present world, in order to bring about a wholly new world. Pippin argues for a reformist reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must find the “traces of reason” latent in the present world, in order to gradually reform it for the better. Ultimately, I argue that Žižek’s reading offers the more authentically Hegelian approach to interpreting Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But if nothing else, the Pippin-Žižek debate demonstrates the profound intellectual fecundity of the intersections between film and philosophy for understanding our current historical moment. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 60, Issue 1, pp 3 - 39 This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It investigates as interrelated matters Parmenides’ impetus for developing and including Doxa, his conception of the mortal epistemic agent in relation both to Doxa’s investigations and to those in Alētheia, and the relation between mortal and divine in his poem. Parmenides, it is argued, maintained that Doxastic cognition is an ineluctable and even appropriate aspect (...) of mortal life. The mortal agent, however, is nonetheless capable of sustaining the cognition of Alētheia by momentarily coming to think with—or as—his divine soul. (shrink)

Edition eines Vorlesungsmanuskriptes aus dem Nachlass von Heinrich Barth in der Universitätsbibliothek Basel.

This article employs Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to clarify Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard. Adorno finds in Kierkegaard’s view of love for the dead both the consummate reified fetish of our instrumentalizing exchange society, and the only unmutilated relation left to us in our otherwise thoroughly damaged lives. Adorno’s negative dialectics emerges as the melancholy science resulting from a disfigured mourning’s present impossibility, upholding a material moral motive rooted in the unmournability of historical catastrophe. Yet this very melancholia also (...) proves to be the last unlikely refuge of hope—in a Kierkegaardian sense—for a future redemption. (shrink)

The research examined the use of moral justification as a mediating mechanism of stress, used by compulsory Israeli soldiers who had served at army roadblocks in the West Bank. Employing Bandura’s model of moral disengagement, we expected that the greater the justification of army roadblocks by the soldier, the more he would feel adjusted to army demands. Feelings of adjustment to this situation were examined using three components: cognitive, affective and behavioral. The sample was composed of 170 Israeli ex-soldiers who (...) had served for at least 1 month at army roadblocks in the West Bank during the Al-Aksa Intifada. The results supported the hypothesis regarding association between moral justification and feelings of adjustment at the end of army service. The mediating hypothesis was partially supported. Significance of moral justification as a mechanism of coping with the enforced situation of military law is discussed. (shrink)

This article imagines an alternative outcome to Hegel’s life-and-death struggle for recognition, one commensurate with Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s allegedly reserved negativity. Rather than pro-ducing lord and bondsman, the struggle is shown to be capable of producing a host and a guest, operating under the relation of hos-pitality. Pitt-Rivers’s reinterpretation of Boas’s classic ethnographic account of Inuit hospitality provides a model for the emergence of the alternative outcome. Derrida’s equation of deconstruction with hospitality illustrates its fundamental differences from Hegelian dialectics, (...) expanding the significance of the struggle and its out-comes to the meaning of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Following the lead of Duncan Pritchard’s “Wittgensteinian Pyrrhonism,” this paper takes a further, comparative and contrastive look at the problem of justification in Sextus Empiricus and in Wittgenstein’sOn Certainty. I argue both that Pritchard’s stimulating account is problematic in certain important respects and that his insights contain much interpretive potential still to be pursued. Diverging from Pritchard, I argue that it is a significant and self-conscious aspect of Sextus’ sceptical strategies to call into question large segments of our belief systemen (...) masseby exposing as apparently unjustifiable fundamental propositions which are closely related in their linchpin role to Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions. In the first instance, the result is a more complex account of both a deeper affinity between Wittgenstein’s approach to hinge propositions and Sextus’ approach to what I termarchaipropositions and a divergence between the two. In the second instance, I suggest how the comparison withOn Certaintycan be illuminating for the interpreter of Sextus. In particular, it can help us to see how the Pyrrhonist’s everyday conduct—common assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding—involves rational procedures of justification, in line with a naturalism reminiscent of Wittgenstein. Furthermore, it can help us to reflect on the Pyrrhonist’s attitude to what Wittgenstein would have called her ‘worldview’. Throughout, I suggest that the comparison with Wittgenstein is interesting, although it must be cashed out differently, not only on the interpretation—or, perhaps, strand—of ancient Pyrrhonism which has the sceptic exempt ordinary beliefs from her suspension of judgement, but also on the interpretation (or strand) which has her disavow all beliefs categorically. (shrink)

Summary Between 1911 and 1914, Owen Richardson formulated a theory of photoelectricity based on thermodynamics and statistical reasoning. Although this theory succeeded in accounting for most of the relevant phenomena and despite the lack of competing causal or descriptive accounts of the phenomena, it failed to attract other physicists. This paper seeks the reasons for the neglect of this theory in contemporary cultures of photoelectric research. Four main causes of neglect are identified: the relatively high number and the nature of (...) the theory's assumptions, the contradiction of one of these assumptions with contemporary views, the failure to suggest new predictions or to account for hitherto unexplained regularities, and the view shared by many scientists that the problem of electromagnetic radiation required a radical solution that a descriptive theory could not provide. The expectation for a radical solution defines the revolutionary character of a research field. In the case of photoelectricity, it originated in a web of evidence to which other fields contributed. The very possibility of Richardson's theory shows that, taken separately, this phenomenon could receive an account which, unlike Einstein's light quantum, did not require deep changes in the conception of nature. (shrink)

When the original Dutch version of this book was presented in 1971 to the University of Leiden as a thesis for the Doctorate in philosophy, I was prevented by the academic mores of that university from expressing my sincere thanks to three members of the Philosophical Faculty for their support of and interest in my pursuits. I take the liberty of doing so now, two and a half years later. First and foremost I want to thank Professor G. Nuchelmans warmly (...) for his expert guidance of my research. A number of my most im portant sources were brought to my attention by him. During the whole process of composing this book his criticism and encouragement were carried out in a truly academic spirit. He thereby provided working conditions that are a sine qua non for every author who is attempting to approach controversial matters in a scientific manner, conditions which, however, were not easily available at that time. In a later phase I also came into contact with Professors L. M. de Rijk and J. B. Ubbink, with both of whom I had highly stimulating discussions and exchanges of ideas. The present edition contains some entirely new sections, viz. 1-9, IV-29, V-9, V-20, VII-14 (iii), (iv), VII-17 (i), VIII-22, IX-17, IX-19, X-9 and XI-8. Section X-9 was inspired by a remark made by Professor A. (shrink)

The current study examines moral dilemmas related to the war against terror: the amounts of force used to arrest or harm a “most wanted” terrorist: the greater the use of force, the higher the risk for harming civilians and the lower the risk to the soldiers and vice versa. The study focuses on the association between moral decisions, confidence, and level of difficulty in making the decisions and political attitudes among Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. In addition, the study examines the (...) differences between regular and reserve combat infantry soldiers regarding these variables. According to study hypotheses results indicate more right-wing political attitudes predicted greater use of force and fewer difficulties in making moral decisions, and reserve soldiers reported higher use of fire, higher confidence, and lower level of difficulty in making moral decisions compared with regular soldiers. (shrink)

The current study uses a repeated measures design to compare two-time points across the COVID-19 pandemic. The first was conducted at the end of the “first wave” [T1] and the second was carried out on October 12-14 2020 in Israel. The participants completed the same questionnaire at both time points. The study examined the predictions of hope and morale at T2 by psychological and demographic predictors at T1. Results indicated the following: The three types of resilience significantly and positively predicted (...) hope and morale. Well-being significantly and positively predicted hope and morale. Younger age significantly and positively predicts higher hope, but not morale. A higher level of religiosity significantly and positively predicts higher hope and morale. More right-wing political attitudes significantly and positively predict higher hope, but not moral. More economic difficulties due to the pandemic, significantly and negatively predict hope and morale. We concluded that hope and morale can serve as significant indicators of the population's ability to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, they can serve as a “thermometer” for the general mood of the population and can be used by decision-makers to assess coping ability at varied stages of the pandemic. (shrink)

This essay is a close examination of one of Nahman of Bratslav's early and largely unexamined texts, Sefer ha‐Middot. The question it addresses is whether one can call this a study of “ethics” or, in Jewish nomenclature, musar, a work that seeks to cultivate human behaviors and describe ethical formation. In addition, it asks whether Sefer ha‐Middot can be called a text of “virtue ethics” given its focus on virtues and their enactment. The essay argues that Nahman's peculiar metaphysical notion (...) that all mitzvot are inextricably intertwined prevents any analysis of behavioral causality severing his “ethics” from any Aristotelian or Kantian tradition and brings him closer to Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of ethics as tied to traditional norms. And even with MacIntyre, the comparison is quite limited. Discussing “faith,” the “zaddik,” and “money,” the essay explores Nahman's view of how these and other virtues are cultivated and achieved. (shrink)

Postliberal theology has been a topic of considerable theological debate over the past few decades. In his 2011 book Another Reformation, Peter Ochs deploys a postliberal theological model for the purpose of developing a sophisticated understanding of the future of interreligious relations. Ochs argues that postliberal theology is a reparative theology focusing on alleviating human suffering. He argues that the Christian idea of supersessionism may be the most challenging for Christians to confront as they explore avenues for making interreligious dialogue (...) more effective. Ochs critiques the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder's understanding of Zionism as Jewish Constantianism for being an instance of an ostensibly postliberal theology losing its way. In this essay, I offer a critique of Ochs's reading of Yoder, claiming that Yoder's view actually mirrors an important intra-Jewish debate about the relationship between political power and piety, and retrieves an ingenious contribution of both early Judaism and early Christianity that is effaced in today's growing Constantinian approach to Christian imperialism and Jewish nationalism. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 36 - 58 This essay explores Martin Buber’s rendering of Jesus and the Ba‘al Shem Tov as two exemplars of religious anarchism that create a lens through which to see the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. The essay argues that Buber’s use of Jesus to construct his view of the Ba‘al Shem Tov enables us to revisit the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity through the category of the religious anarchist.

In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical I tried to clarify and expand some of the thoughtful and astute themes in the remarks of my interlocutors, especially about how the book was not intended to be about one figure but rather an intervention into postwar American and Israeli Judaism through the lens of a maligned figure who is ignored by most American Jews (...) and demonized by most Israeli Jews. Meir Kahane remains present because he never went away. And he never went away because he offered solutions that, while unpopular and egregious, continue to resonate when Jews begin to feel unstable about their place in America or Israel. He is the dark underside of the modern Jewish project that will not go away. (shrink)