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"In the gorgeous and rugged terrain of Jewish thought, there is no higher mountain to climb than Maimonides, and no more slippery or exhilarating ascent. Halbertal has made it all the way to the top, and his survey of the whole of the Maimonidean landscape is trustworthy and masterful. This is the richest and most intellectually sophisticated book on Maimonides I have ever read."--Leon Wieseltier "In this learned and penetrating work, Halbertal offers us a Maimonides who draws on the dominant (...) Greco-Islamic thought of his time while creating a system of thought that is fully Jewish. He shows us how the early "Commentary on the Mishnah" links up with the "Mishneh Torah" and with the "Guide of the Perplexed," written at the end of his life, to form an unexpected and radical intellectual unity. Beautifully written, "Maimonides" brings out both Maimonides's intellectual success and the paradoxical critical approaches to him after his death."--David J. Wasserstein, Vanderbilt University "Insightful and learned. Halbertal is perhaps the leading philosopher of Jewish law today. His book on Maimonides, like his other writings, reflects wide erudition and is written clearly and sharply."--Warren Zev Harvey, professor emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Displaying the marvelous depth and clarity that mark all his work, Halbertal explains in abundant detail the transformations that Maimonides sought to effect in the Jewish world. He provides incisive interpretations of both legal and philosophical writings, yet he is also a biographer, binding together Maimonides's life, self-perception, and intellectual agenda. This is an exceptionally rich book, one that offers fresh perspectives for experts and a highly accessible introduction for general readers."--David Shatz, Yeshiva University "An outstanding and thrilling portrait of Maimonides. Halbertal's analytic lucidity and psychological depth are singular, and his talents are abundantly apparent on every page. This is an extraordinary book."--Menachem Lorberbaum, Tel Aviv University. (shrink)

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in (...) medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition. (shrink)

The book is at its most profound in sorting out the relation between violence and sacrifice. Altogether, this is a very moving and deep book--philosophically, anthropologically, and religiously.

Psychological traits and disorders are often interrelated through shared genetic influences. A combination of maximum-likelihood structural equation modelling and multidimensional scaling enables us to open a window onto the genetic architecture at the symptom level, rather than at the level of latent genetic factors. We illustrate this approach using a study of cognitive abilities involving over 5,000 pairs of twins.

In March 2004, Coca-Cola suspended production at its $12 million bottling plant in Kerala, southern India. The plant had become the focus of an around-the-clock protest by local citizens, who noticed that the water in their wells had either dried up or become polluted within months of the plant’s opening. They were joined first by local and eventually by global activists concerned about resource privatization on a larger scale. As the controversy snowballed, figuring persistently in print and online media, the (...) local governing authority, which had initially welcomed the plant, refused to renew its license. Even state government, normally supportive of foreign investment, became part of the vortex of forces aligned against Coca-Cola, and the company finds itself caught in a web of legal, strategic and ethical challenges. Rather than presenting the deepening crisis primarily from the perspective of corporate management, this case study offers a wholistic narrative, with first-person accounts from a wide array of stakeholders. (shrink)

In March 2004, Coca-Cola suspended production at its $12 million bottling plant in Kerala, southern India. The plant had become the focus of an around-the-clock protest by local citizens, who noticed that the water in their wells had either dried up or become polluted within months of the plant’s opening. They were joined first by local and eventually by global activists concerned about resource privatization on a larger scale. As the controversy snowballed, figuring persistently in print and online media, the (...) local governing authority, which had initially welcomed the plant, refused to renew its license. Even state government, normally supportive of foreign investment, became part of the vortex of forces aligned against Coca-Cola, and the company finds itself caught in a web of legal, strategic and ethical challenges. Rather than presenting the deepening crisis primarily from the perspective of corporate management, this case study offers a wholistic narrative, with first-person accounts from a wide array of stakeholders. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Route Finding and the Creation of a Commons Creating Value, Building Community Property Rights and Climbing Conclusion Notes.