Kabbalistic reading in harav Yehuda L(acute}e on Ashk(acute}enazi (manitou)'s historiosophic teachings.

In the rabbinic literature from the land of Israel the poor are depicted not as passive recipients of gifts and support, but as independent agents who are responsible for their own behaviour. Communal care for the needy was expected to go beyond their basic needs for food, clothing and shelter; the physical safety of the poor and the value of their time as well as their dignity and self-worth were also included in the scope of charity. In this monograph, Yael (...) Wilfand offers a comprehensive and contextual analysis of major rabbinic texts on poverty and charity composed during the first five centuries of the Common Era in the land of Israel, principally the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim. She shows that, for the rabbis, the poor were not necessarily considered outsiders; indeed, some students and rabbis in Palestine may have personally experienced poverty. Wilfand claims that such socio-economic diversity contributed to the thinking of these rabbis, who rarely saw poverty as a result of transgression (in contrast to the Babylonian Talmud). This book presents a number of contrasting viewpoints held by Palestinian rabbis over such questions as: Must communal administrators ensure applicants' eligibility for alms? Should the newly indigent from wealthy families receive exceptional levels of support? Might neighbouring gentiles qualify for economic assistance from Jewish communal sources? By examining Palestinian rabbinic sources within the contexts both of the hegemonic Greco-Roman (later, Christian) milieu and of the biblical heritage, this volume offers an absorbing account of some ancient approaches to timeless social challenges. (shrink)

The human self model suggests that the construct of self involves functions such as agency, body-centered spatial perspectivity, and long-term unity. Vogeley, Kurthen, Falkai, and Maieret (1999) suggest that agency is subserved by the prefrontal cortex and other association areas of the cortex, spatial perspectivity by the prefrontal cortex and the parietal lobes, and long-term unity by the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes and that all of these functions are impaired in schizophrenia. Exploring the connections between the prefrontal cortex (...) and the construct of self, the present article extends the application of the self model to autism. It suggests that in contrast to schizophrenia, agency and spatial perspectivity are probably preserved in autism, but that, similarly to schizophrenia, long-term unity is probably impaired. This hypothesis is compatible with a model of neuropsychological dysfunction in autism in a neural network including parts of the prefrontal cortex, the temporal lobes, and the cerebellum. (shrink)

We show in rather informal terms how witness sets can be useful in both explicating some basic intuitions about scope and understanding how particular denotational semantic differences between noun phrases affect their abilities to bear out certain scopal patterns. More generally we suggest that the usual notion of scope needs to be factored into variation distributivity and maximality. This part lays some groundwork for several of the subsequent chapters and is thus of interest to all readers. The second part shows (...) that already in this initial raw form the above insights can be applied to make a novel claim concerning the availability of so-called branching readings. In logical terms a branching reading can be defined for any sentence with a subject and a direct object. However speakers of English accept only a fraction of these readings, so the question arises how the data can be predicted from the meanings of the participating quantifiers and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We propose that thinking about the behavior of quantifiers along the lines introduced in the first part leads to a simple answer to this question. (shrink)