The sources to which one has to turn for information about the lives of Hasidic masters belong to the hagiographical tradition. During its first stage of compilation in the early nineteenth century, this tradition preserved much authentic historical and biographical material, in spite of the explicit disavowal of any historiographical intent by its editors. They were apologetic about the publication of "mere tales and histories" whose value lay not in the preservation of historical records but rather in their capacity for (...) moral and religious edification. Up until then, this material had been circulating orally but, in contrast to speculative-homiletical works, was not recognized as a legitimate and useful tool for the propagation of Hasidism. However, from the second half of the nineteenth century, in response to the challenges of Jewish Enlightenment, secularization, and most directly in response to the scornful critique of Hasidism and its hagiography which was emanating from the new school of modern Jewish historiography, Hasidic authors, like the exponents of other nineteenth-century ideologies, were beginning to appeal to history for validation. They were adopting the scholarly mannerisms if not quite the historical methodology of their critics. Since the hagiographical tales, and the chain of oral transmission which had traditionally preserved and authenticated them, were both losing their credibility in the new atmosphere of rationalistic skepticism and scientific rigor, Hasidic hagiographers were now eager to present their morally edifying oral traditions as reliable historical records by anchoring them in concrete documentary evidence. The forgeries of the Kherson Genizah supplied what appeared to be incontestable "archival" verification of the tales. The Admor Joseph Isaac Schneersohn exploited the Kherson "documents" in his extensive histories of early Hasidism which reveal his anachronistic, typological thinking and are often incompatible with the facts. As a leader of HaBaD Hasidism at a time of crisis, he saw it as his duty to harness the powerful historiographical idiom to the tasks of rehabilitating the HaBaD movement and of campaigning for the preservation of Orthodox Jewish life in conditions of unprecedented adversity. (shrink)

In thirteenth-century philosophical psychology, it is commonly held that the powers of the soul, responsible for a living being’s various operations, “flow” from the soul’s essence. The phrase is used systematically by Albert the Great, who imports it from Avicenna. It suggests that the soul, considered as a separate substance, is ontologically distinct from its powers. This is how Albert understands Avicenna, and how modern interpreters understand both Avicenna and Albert. The aim of this paper is to (...) call into question such an understanding, as a reading of Avicenna and as a philosophical doctrine. It argues that an ontological distinction between the soul and its powers isn’t intended in Avicenna, and isn’t successfully established in Albert. It further argues that psychological emanation yields such a distinction only in Aquinas, where the soul is no longer considered a separate substance, but a material form. (shrink)

The Liber de causis, a monotheistic reworking of Proclus' Elements of Theology, was translated from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century, with an attribution to Aristotle. Considering this Neoplatonic text a product of Aristotle's school and even the completion of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Albert the Great concluded his series of Aristotelian paraphrases by commenting on it. To do so was to invite controversy, since accidents of translation had made many readers think that the Liber de causis taught that God (...) made only the first creature, which in turn created the diverse multitude of lesser things. Thus, Albert's contemporaries in the Christian West took the text to uphold the supposedly Aristotelian doctrine that from the One only one thing can emanate--a doctrine they rejected, believing as they did that God freely determined the number and kinds of creatures. Albert, however, defended the philosophers against the theologians of his day, denying that the thesis "from the One only one proceeds" removed God's causality from the diversity and multiplicity of our world. This Albert did by appealing to a greater theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and equating the being that is the subject of metaphysics with the procession of Being from God's intellect, a procession Dionysius described in On the Divine Names. Creation as Emanation examines Albert's reading of the Liber de causis with an eye toward two questions: First, how does Albert view the relation between faith and reason, so that he can identify creation from nothing with emanation from God? And second, how does he understand Platonism and Aristotelianism, so that he can avoid the misreadings of his fellow theologians by finding in a late-fifth-century Neoplatonist the key to Aristotle's meaning? (shrink)

The theme of essential futility, absurdity, utter incomprehensibility of life and death is stressed in almost allthe writings of Albert Camus. Like Buddha he was shocked by the sight of human misery and mortality. Yet, paradoxically was attracted to the essential desirability of it. Although completely ruffled by the consciousness of an ambiguous and silent God, he was not unaware of “that strange joy that comes from a tranquil conscience”, a perfect inner harmony one experiences on attaining true knowledge. (...) Upanishads are a search for this very reality underlying the flux of things. Malraux, Sartre, and others had already developed this line of thought before Camus. What is essential and original in him is, firstly, that the world’s absurdity not a cause for despair, but on the contrary, a spur to happiness. And secondly, that , mortality and suffering actually enhance the value of life: they invite men to live more intensely. In addition to absurdity another subject the Upanishads insistently deal with is ethics, the purity of human conduct. Very much in the manner of the Existentialists, the Upanishads, aeons before, hold man himself responsible for his actions. Dr. Radhakrishnan, very aptly says that Existentialism is a new name for an ancient method. In Albert Camus and India Sharad Chandra has put forward a convincing comparative study of the two philosophies as expounded in their respective literatures. Her argument is that the parallel ideas found in the two views are not mere fortuitous conclusions but, either the result of seminal influence, or emanation of a common, deeper vision. Reading of the book will help the reader to form a firm opinion. Camus had read the Gita and had attended the lectures given by Swami Shraddhananda of the Ramakrishna Mission in Paris. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Every person has his/her own unique signature that is used mainly for the purposes of personal identification and verification of important documents or legal transactions. There are two kinds of signature verification: static and dynamic. Static(off-line) verification is the process of verifying an electronic or document signature after it has been made, while dynamic(on-line) verification takes place as a person creates his/her signature on a digital tablet or a similar device. Offline signature verification is not efficient and slow for a (...) large number of documents. To overcome the drawbacks of offline signature verification, we have seen a growth in online biometric personal verification such as fingerprints, eye scan etc. In this paper we created CNN model using python for offline signature and after training and validating, the accuracy of testing was 99.70%. (shrink)

In their article, Friesen et al. (2023) discuss two challenging roles the IRBs are playing: protecting research participants from research-related risks and promoting inclusion of diverse populatio...

In his article, Ismaili M’hamdi argues that a neutralist approach in public health policy might turn into a gap that separates citizens who endure preventable poor conditions from the state...

From the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, a hugely influential book that challenged key assertions by Niels Bohr and other founders of quantum mechanics, A Guess at the Riddle provides a major metaphysical overhaul of one of physics' most intractable problems-the quest to bridge quantum and classical physics in order to understand the nature of reality.

J'appelle ‘morale', dans le sens le plus général du mot, l'ensemble des règles qui doivent diriger l'activité libre de l'homme. Toutes dérivent d'un principe commun, par une méthode commune ; toutes répondent, dans l'une des voies ouvertes à l'activité humaine, à la question : Qu'est-ce qui doit être? Ce qui doit être, c'est ce qui est conforme à une fin rationnelle, ce qui est rationnellement souhaitable. Pourtant, les philosophes ne s'accordent pas sur l'essence du devoir-être et des divergences apparaissent entre (...) eux quant à la définition du devoir-être. Désigne-t-il une loi morale, un idéal, un ordre transcendant ou même un droit? (shrink)

There has been a spurt in both fundamental and translational research that examines the underlying mechanisms of the human microbiome in psychiatric disorders. The personalized and dynamic features of the human microbiome suggest the potential of its manipulation for precision psychiatry in ways to improve mental health and avoid disease. However, findings in the field of microbiome also raise philosophical and ethical questions. From a philosophical point of view, they may yet be another attempt at providing a biological cause for (...) phenomena that ultimately cannot be so easily localized. From an ethical point of view, it is relevant that the human gut microbiome comprises data on the individual’s lifestyle, disease history, previous medications, and mental health. Massive datasets of microbiome sequences are collected to facilitate comparative studies to identify specific links between the microbiome and mental health. Although this emerging research domain may show promise for psychiatric patients, it is surrounded by ethical challenges regarding patient privacy, health risks, effects on personal identity, and concerns about responsibility. This narrative overview displays the roles and advances of microbiome research in psychiatry and discusses the philosophical and ethical implications of microbiome big data and microbiome-based interventions for psychiatric patients. We also investigate whether these issues are really “new,” or “old wine in new bottles.”. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 25-27.

The existence of a topological double-covering for the GL(n, R) and diffeomorphism groups is reviewed. These groups do not have finite-dimensional faithful representations. An explicit construction and the classification of all\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\overline {SL} $$ \end{document}(n, R), n=3,4 unitary irreducible representations is presented. Infinite-component spinorial and tensorial\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\overline {SL} $$ \end{document} fields, “manifields”, are introduced. Particle content of the ladder manifields, as given by (...) the\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\overline {SL} $$ \end{document}(3, R) “little” group, is determined. The manifields are lifted to the corresponding world spinorial and tensorial manifields by making use of generalized infinite-component frame fields. World manifields transform w.r.t. corresponding\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\overline {Diff} $$ \end{document} representations, which are constructed explicitly. (shrink)

Especially nice models of intuitionistic set theories are realizability models $V$, where $\mathcal A$ is an applicative structure or partial combinatory algebra. This paper is concerned with the preservation of various choice principles in $V$ if assumed in the underlying universe $V$, adopting Constructive Zermelo–Fraenkel as background theory for all of these investigations. Examples of choice principles are the axiom schemes of countable choice, dependent choice, relativized dependent choice and the presentation axiom. It is shown that any of these axioms (...) holds in $V$ for every applicative structure $\mathcal A$ if it holds in the background universe.1 It is also shown that a weak form of the countable axiom of choice, $\textbf{AC}^{\boldsymbol{\omega, \omega }}$, is rendered true in any $V$ regardless of whether it holds in the background universe. The paper extends work by McCarty and Rathjen. (shrink)

L’Union Européenne vit sous un régime de démocratie représentative de type fédéral dont la particularité est d’être en vigueur dans un État qui n’est pas fédéral. Les critiques qui l’accablent aujourd’hui sont en grande partie liées aux ambiguïtés et aux impasses qu’engendre l’enchevêtrement, pas toujours très clair, des pouvoirs actuellement exercés par le Parlement, la Commission et le Conseil. Une autre partie de la critique est plus tranchante : elle récuse le principe même de la construction européenne en l’accusant d’instituer (...) un déni de démocratie. Trois arguments étayent ce réquisitoire : le premier pointe la perte de souveraineté nationale ; le second le manque de représentativité des élus ; le troisième le déficit de légitimité des autorités en place. Des révisions apportées à chacun de ces trois facteurs permettraient-elles de conforter la démocratie dans le cadre européen? (shrink)

Sartre importe à l'histoire vivante de la philosophie sous plusieurs angles. Héritier de Hegel qui le hante, il conteste celui-ci dans sa conviction « totaliste ». S'il reste fidèle au dynamisme hégélien, à l'interrogation constante du vécu, il les traduit pourtant par nos langages présents.

Nagappan, Kalokairinou, and Wexler (2021) raised a serious ethical question: Are off-label practices or direct-to-consumer medical devices offered to public exempted from clinical or research gover...

The definition of “personality” and related concepts is both unclear and not unified among medical, scientific, humanities and social sciences experts (i.e., essentialist, dynamic view of self, nar...

In this article, we analyze and reject two versions of the content‐argument against animal beliefs, namely, the ontological argument from Davidson and the epistemological argument from Stich. One of the main defects of the strongest version of the argument is that it over‐intellectualizes belief ascriptions in humans and thus sets the comparative bar for belief ascriptions in animals too high. In the second part of the article, we develop a gradualist notion of belief which captures basic beliefs as well as (...) Davidsonian linguistic beliefs, and we specify the conditions under which belief ascriptions to nonlinguistic animals are justified. (shrink)

“CHN≓ (1966)was an algebraic algorithm which reproduced and extended the predictions of the “non-interacting≓ quark model in the asymptotic high-energy region. It wus formulated within the conceptual framework of on- mass- shell physics and of the complex angular-momentum plane. Prior to the advent of the standard model, it was reinterpreted in terms of the Melosh transformation relating “current≓ to “constituent≓ quarks. It is now lied up to the QCD paradigm.

We relate personal encounters of three kinds with geometrical approaches in the development of a relativistic quantum field theory of the fundamental interactions—including interactions with Nathan Rosen. We characterize the geometrical structures involved and discuss the more recent attempts to develop a unified theory based on a Klein-Kaluza contraction of the eightfold extended supergravity.

It's time to engage with human society as a society. It seems that the individualistic age in which we live has exhausted itself. It is time to take a collective mental account of the way we live, the relationship between people and society, and what social structure we need." "The importance of human society, and offers various suggestions for improving the existing social structure, while emphasizing the failures in the economy related to the existing socio-economic system, which led to the (...) recent economic crisis. The book is intended to stimulate thought on social issues. - translation from the back cover. (shrink)