Within the rich literary tradition of the West Syrian (i.e., Syriac Orthodox) Church, two ninth-century authors stand out thanks to a curious problem. The authors are the bishops John of Dara, who lived in the first half of the century, and Moses bar Kepha, who died in northern Iraq in 903. The problem is the literary relationship between several of the texts transmitted in their names. Applying a three-pronged approach to this synoptic problem, this article offers a path toward a (...) solution. On the basis of biographical, stylistic, and philological arguments, it is argued that at least one text that goes under John’s name, On Heretics, was not in fact written by him. The author of that text, likely operating in the tenth century, drew heavily from Moses bar Kepha’s treatise On Paradise, while reshaping the material from Moses, and also incorporating additional material from other sources. (shrink)

Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...) learned as time has passed. While the second step resembles traditional procedures of updating by conditionalization, the first is best understood by analogy to traditional models of how agents transmit self-locating opinions through ordinary interpersonal communication. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 1 Seiten: 57-77.

This essay explicates and assesses Yeshayahu Leibowitz's axiology, and its relation to the value he claims halakhic practice instantiates: service of God. It argues that, while Leibowitz often affirms a relativist “polytheism of values,” he sometimes implies that the religious value is the “most valuable value.” However, this is not due to its material content, because serving God is objectively best; rather it is because, consonant with his negative theology, it most fully instantiates the formal properties of a value. The (...) essay concludes by assessing the tenability of Leibowitz's metaethics as well as the argument for positing this contentless value as an intention and reason for halakhic practice. (shrink)

How can international courts better establish their legitimacy? We can better answer this question by first focusing on what scholars have learned about how national courts build legitimacy over time. The literature suggests that national courts strategically build legitimacy by balancing their own policy preferences with those of their audiences. In so doing, they attempt to avoid instances of court curbing that can diminish legitimacy over the long run. Applying a similar strategy may be more difficult for international courts for (...) two key reasons: they serve audiences with more diverse preferences than national courts; they are less likely to be able to predict which rulings will result in significant backlashes from these audiences. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines the professional boundaries and obstacles encountered by Eritrean graduates of a medical interpreter course in Israel. Through a series of personal interviews held about a year after their graduation, we identified professional and personal boundaries as a recurring theme. Drawing on the inspiring work of Erving Goffman, we discuss the tension between their “normative roles” and “typical roles.” By deploying two heuristic two-way typologies—in reference to the service provider or the patient, and in reference to formal or (...) informal interpreting settings—we propose that the tension between the normative and the typical manifests most clearly within formal interpreting settings and vis-à-vis the service providers, and is least present outside formal settings and vis-à-vis the patients. Recognizing that the role of the interpreter tends to extend well beyond its formal setting, we conclude by reflecting on how the circumstances of marginalization and lack of support—incurred by t... (shrink)

The authors review the profound and diverse ways in which mysticism is embedded in and influences belief, lifestyle, identity and politics in Jewish life in Israel and North America. They outline some existential and cultural dimensions of the conditions in which this phenomena flourish, specifically relating to the condition of post-modernity. The seeming dominance of mysticism over more rational forms of religious belief and behavior is explored. The opposite ideational and historic trends within Jewish mysticism as they relate to national (...) lifestyle, being alternatively closed and parochial or open and universal are reviewed. The authors suggest that, in light of the current situation within and outside of the Jewish people, the latter approach needs to be strengthened. (shrink)

It has long been known that brain damage has important negative effects on one’s mental life and even eliminates one’s ability to have certain conscious experiences. It thus stands to reason that when all of one’s brain activity ceases upon death, consciousness is no longer possible and so neither is an afterlife. It seems clear that human consciousness is dependent upon functioning brains. This essay reviews some of the overall neurological evidence from brain damage studies and concludes that our argument (...) from brain damage has been vindicated by such overwhelming evidence. It also puts forth a more mature philosophical rationale against an afterlife and counters several replies to the argument. -/- 1. Philosophical Background -- 2. The Dependence of Consciousness on the Brain: Some Preliminary Evidence -- 3. Brain Damage, Lesion Studies, and the Localization of Mental Function - 3.1 Perception - 3.2 Awareness, Comprehension, and Recognition - 3.3 Memory - 3.4 Personality - 3.5 Language - 3.6 Emotion - 3.7 Decision-Making - 3.8 Social Cognition and Theory of Mind - 3.9 Moral Judgment and Empathy - 3.10 Neurological Disorders and Disease - 3.11 The Unity of Consciousness -- 4. Objections and Replies - 4.1 Souls, Minds, and Energy Fields - 4.2 The Instrument Theory - 4.3 The Embodied Soul Alone is Affected -- 5. Conclusion. (shrink)

We sought to expand on the concept of the moral self to include not just the duty to develop the moral self but the moral duty to develop the self in both moral and non-moral ways. To do this, we focused on how leaders can promote a climate in which individuals feel a sense of duty to develop themselves for the betterment of the team and organization. In our theoretical model, duty orientation plays a key role in determining whether followers (...) will seek performance feedback to develop their work selves. We hypothesized that followers with ethical leaders would experience a greater sense of duty to improve themselves and would therefore be more likely to seek and less likely to avoid leader feedback. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesized that duty orientation would mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior, expert power would moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and duty orientation such that duty orientation would be higher when followers perceived their leader to be both highly ethical and competent, and expert power would moderate the indirect effect of ethical leadership on feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior through duty orientation. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 249 followers across two waves of data collection. Results suggest that ethical leadership and leader competence interact to drive followers’ duty orientation, thereby reducing followers’ feedback-avoiding behaviors. Further, ethical leadership had a direct positive relationship with followers’ feedback-seeking behaviors. (shrink)

When theorising about disagreement, it is tempting to begin with a person's belief that p and ask what mental state one must have in order to disagree with it. This is the wrong way to go; the paper argues that people may also disagree with attitudes that are not beliefs. It then examines whether several existing theories of disagreement can account for this phenomenon. It argues that its own normative theory of disagreement gives the best account, and so, given that (...) there is good reason to believe disagreement without belief is possible, there is good reason to think that disagreement itself is normative. (shrink)

Humeans believe that at least some of our desires give us reasons for action. This view is widely accepted by social scientists and has some following among philosophers. In recent years important objections were raised against this position by Scanlon, Dancy, and others. The foundations of the Humean view have never been properly defended.In the first part of the paper I discuss some objections to the Humean position. In the second part I attempt to provide an argument for the claim (...) that the Humean view gives us a plausible, even if not exclusive, understanding of our notion of reasons. The particular version of the Humean view I set out to defend is that only desires that the agent is not alienated from, and that are not impulses, are reason giving. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace-BookAnn MossThroughout Western Europe in the sixteenth century, schoolboys and grown men educated in the Latin schools of the humanists would recognize the commonplace-book as an indispensable tool for making sense of the books they read, for assimilating the written culture transmitted to them, and for possessing the means of production in their turn. This handy organizer of information and rather effective (...) retrieval mechanism has been treated with a fair amount of contempt after being sidelined towards the end of the seventeenth century and then falling into public disrepute, its rich stock of precious commonplaces devalued into the small change of mere banalities. Nor indeed does it suit the agenda of post-Romantic scholars and critics looking in a simplistic way for signs of originality and innovation. However, the last few years have seen commonplaces in their more sophisticated guise back on the critical agenda, with several particular studies and, latterly, two major overviews published in a single year. 1 The thesis underlying this paper is that the commonplace-book is central to an understanding of how knowledge was organized in the early modern period. More than that, the commonplace-book keys us into procedures of investigation and debate and into the dialectical and rhetorical modes of articulating thought which were agreed to have persuasive force; and it exhibits the commonality of expectations, the common places, which ensured a common route into a shared area of communication when the cultural consensus of Western Europe was strained to breaking point.One test of this thesis will be whether it can be usefully applied to texts which fit badly into interpretative frames familiar to the modern reader. The particular purpose of this paper is to apply the principles of commonplace-book [End Page 421] reading to just such an awkward case, in order at least to suggest the possibility of recovering an historically probable reading strategy which may more fully recuperate the text for the modern reader. The Politica of the eminent Stoic philosopher and scholar of antiquity, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), is a network of quotations from ancient authorities linked together by Lipsius’s own words. He himself regarded it as one of his most important achievements. His contemporaries and their seventeenth-century descendants knew perfectly well how to read it, and there is plenty of evidence that they regarded it highly. 2 Modern readers find it an embarrassment, not knowing quite what to do with a book from which the author eclipses himself, yet keeps a dead hand on it: “All of it is mine and nothing is.” 3 Modern critics tend to assume it is all Lipsius, riding roughshod over the quotation indicators 4 ; or they prefer to think that nothing is and treat the text solely as a compilation of extracts 5 ; or they get tied in knots trying to rescue Lipsius’s voice drowned out in his quotations. 6 But Lipsius’s original readers in 1589 knew how to read it, because he told them: “For what is it but a well-arranged register of accounts or COMMONPLACES?” 7If we are going to get anywhere near the original point of reception, we must remind ourselves about commonplaces and commonplace-books. It was Erasmus in De copia who gave the first systematic guidelines for making commonplace-books, but by the time of Lipsius schoolboys in every Latin school in Northern Europe were busy excerpting from their [End Page 422] texts as they read, either under the schoolmaster’s instructions or at their own discretion. The commonplace-book was a probe and an instrument for redistributing text so as to ensure maximal retrievability and optimum application. Here is one of the many enthusiastic promoters of the practice, writing in 1564:So that the more important passages in the authors set for reading and the more brilliant sententiae, exempla, similitudes, words, phrases, and outstanding figurative expressions may be the more readily imprinted on the memory and available and ready for use as occasion requires, it is extremely useful to have the common-places of the main intellectual disciplines arranged in a definite order, under which students may note... (shrink)

The ethical and political dilemmas raised byInformation and Communication Technology (ICT)have only just begun to be understood. Theimpact of centralised data collection, masscommunication technologies or the centrality ofcomputer technology as a means of accessingimportant social institutions, all poseimportant ethical and political questions. As away of capturing some of these effects I willcharacterise them in terms of the type of powerand, more particularly, the ‘Power-over’ peoplethat they exercise. My choice of thisparticular nomenclature is that it allows us todescribe, firstly, how specific (...) technologiesoperate and second, exactly what sorts ofconstraints they impose on people. The reasonfor this focus has to do with a further aim ofthe essay, which is to intervene in aparticular type of debate that is often hadaround the appropriate use and scope oftheories of power that are employed in thinkingabout ICT, especially those theories associatedwith the work of Michel Foucault. There isconsiderable use of his work in computerethics, but my claim will be that despite theproductive uses of his work in the areas ofsurveillance, for instance, it does not exhaustthe larger potential of his work on power and,in part, `government.' I will argue that inorder to properly understand the politicalimpact of some aspects of ICT, especially thedigital divide, one needs an account of howpower operates that includes more traditionaltypes of power-over. To the extent that I willdeal with these concerns, the paper is both acontribution to debates about the nature andscope of Foucault's theory of power and to theissue of the effects of the digital divide. (shrink)

Humeans believe that at least some of our desires give us reasons for action. This view is widely accepted by social scientists and has some following among philosophers. In recent years important objections were raised against this position by Scanlon, Dancy, and others. The foundations of the Humean view have never been properly defended. In the first part of the paper I discuss some objections to the Humean position. In the second part I attempt to provide an argument for the (...) claim that the Humean view gives us a plausible, even if not exclusive, understanding of our notion of reasons. The particular version of the Humean view I set out to defend is that only desires that the agent is not alienated from, and that are not impulses, are reason giving. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of bioprinting personalised medical device technology and its ethical challenges to regulation and research ethics. I argue the inclusion of bioprinting applications within existing regulatory frameworks does not adequately address the technologies disruption to the traditionally siloed activities of research and treatment. Using the conceptual framework of liminality, I offer a meaningful way to engage with this technology and address some identified concerns with how it will be categorised and the appropriate recognition of its evidentiary (...) thresholds. I demonstrate these concerns through the exploration of limited conventional research methodologies tasked with the production of generalisable knowledge, specifically population-based evidence that is derived from Randomised Clinical Trials. I use Australian regulatory amendments introduced in 2021 as an example of current regulatory trajectories and highlight why I believe this approach to be insufficient. The significance of this argument will be to demonstrate the disruption of bioprinting applications to current approaches in medical policy, and how various jurisdictions are enacting regulation that is not fit for purpose. (shrink)

This volume presents twelve original papers on the idea that moral objectivity is to be understood in terms of a suitably constructed social point of view that all can accept.

Despite being largely overlooked in the literature, Israel provides a rare example of what a full decade of twenty-first century populism in power looks like. Based on an examination of rhetoric and policymaking between 2009 and 2019, this article brings the writing on the subject up to date and highlights the unique traits of Israeli populism. In so doing it establishes that Israeli populism has been mainstreamed to a remarkable extent and currently encompasses almost all right-wing parties in the country’s (...) legislature. Moreover, it shows that the Israeli case embodies a variety of populism which has yet to be acknowledged in the literature – neither economic nor cultural in character, but rather based on national security issues. The concept of ‘security-driven populism’, introduced here, could prove useful to researchers studying other populist regimes that do not fit neatly into the ‘culture versus economy’ debate, which has dominated the field for years. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Music’s power to express and arouse feelings has been one of its principal attributes from antiquity. While the topic remains prevalent in contemporary discourse, relatively little attention had been given to specifically melancholic expressions in European music. The article examines various stages in western music history vis-à-vis the changing formulations and receptions of melancholy as a cultural phenomenon, from the time it was perceived as a sign of either a physical or a moral problem to later historical periods, when (...) positive and negative views on melancholy intertwined. In this article, I point at an interesting connection between melancholic representations in music works and music’s unique relationship with time. As I show, prevalent conventions of pre-modern music, which manifest cyclical (or ‘theological’) structures of time, keep the listener’s experience simultaneously rooted in the present and floating in eternity. Alternatively, the linear (or ‘teleological’) sense of temporality found in early-modern and modern music works allows for the possibility of ‘looking back’ and experiencing longings. Various diachronic and synchronic temporal sensitivities, which manifest explicit (via titles or texts) or implicit melancholic feelings, are explored. Music’s linearity is shown to provide it a lost past to mourn. (shrink)

Hume''s farmer''s dilemma is usually construed as demonstrating the failure of Humeanism in practical reason and as providing an argument in favor of externalism or the theory of resolute choice. But thedilemma arises only when Humeanism is combined with the assumptionthat direct and intentional control of our desires – desiring atwill – is impossible. And such an assumption, albeit widely accepted,has little in its support. Once we reject that assumption we can describe a solution to the dilemma within the bounds (...) of Humeanism. Moreover, wefind in this new solution as argument for the idea of desiring at will. (shrink)

Gibbard argues that we have to accord others a certain fundamental epistemic normative authority. To avoid skepticism we must accept some of our normative principles; since the influence of others was a major factor in the process that led us to adopt them, we must accord others fundamental normative authority. The argument ought to be of interest to a wide range of philosophers, since while compatible with expressivism, it does not assume expressivism. It has rarely been discussed. In this essay (...) I analyse the argument, explain why it is not sound and make a suggestion about the real upshot of the rejection of normative skepticism. (shrink)

According to Railton: x is good for me iff my Fully Informed Self (FIS) while contemplating my situation would want me to want x. I offer four interpretations of this view. The first three are inadequate. Their inadequacy rests on the following two facts: (a) my FIS cannot want me to want what would be irrational for me to want, (b) when contemplating what is rational for me to want we must specify a particular way in which I could rationally (...) acquire the recommended desire. As a result, what my FIS could reasonably want me to want is limited by what information my FIS could reliably convey to me. And therefore what my FIS could reasonably want me to want cannot be grounded in changes in desires that my FIS cannot publicly justify. The fourth interpretation limits the scope of what my FIS could want me to want in a way that avoids these problems, but conflicts with standard intuitions about what is a non-moral good. (shrink)

How does neuronal activity give rise to cognitive capacities? To address this question, neuroscientists hypothesize about what neurons “represent,” “encode,” or “compute,” and test these hypotheses empirically. This process is similar to the assessment of hypotheses in other fields of science and as such is subject to the same limitations and difficulties that have been discussed at length by philosophers of science. In this paper, we highlight an additional difficulty in the process of empirical assessment of hypotheses that is unique (...) to the cognitive sciences. We argue that, unlike in other scientific fields, comparing hypotheses according to the extent to which they explain or predict empirical data can lead to absurd results. Other considerations, which are perhaps more subjective, must be taken into account. We focus on one such consideration, which is the purposeful function of the neurons as part of a biological system. We believe that progress in neuroscience critically depends on properly addressing this difficulty. (shrink)