Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past which are alterable, and argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past. (shrink)

The late Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld possessed the enviable ability to relate to a wide range of people. The genuineness of his caring for others, his rock-solid convictions and fluent expression created a magnetic personality few could resist. His ch.

Significant advancements towards a future of big data genomic medicine, associated with large-scale public dataset repositories, intensify dilemmas of genomic privacy. To resolve dilemmas adequately, we need to understand the relative force of the competing considerations that make them up. Attitudes towards genomic privacy are complex and not well understood; understanding is further complicated by the vague claim of ‘genetic exceptionalism’. In this paper, we distinguish between consequentialist and non-consequentialist privacy interests: while the former are concerned with harms secondary to (...) exposure, the latter represent the interest in a private sphere for its own sake, as an essential component of human dignity. Empirical studies of attitudes towards genomic privacy have almost never targeted specifically this important dignitary component of the privacy interest. In this paper we first articulate the question of a non-consequentialist genomic privacy interest, and then present results of an empirical study that probed people’s attitudes towards that interest. This was done via comparison to other non-consequentialist privacy interests, which are more tangible and can be more easily assessed. Our results indicate that the non-consequentialist genomic privacy interest is rather weak. This insight can assist in adjudicating dilemmas involving genomic privacy. (shrink)

Libertarian paternalism's notion of “nudging” refers to steering individual decision making so as to make choosers better off without breaching their free choice. If successful, this may offer an ideal synthesis between the duty to respect patient autonomy and that of beneficence, which at times favors paternalistic influence. A growing body of literature attempts to assess the merits of nudging in health care. However, this literature deals almost exclusively with health policy, while the question of the potential benefit of nudging (...) for the practice of informed consent has escaped systematic analysis. This article focuses on this question. While it concedes that nudging could amount to improper exploitation of cognitive weaknesses, it defends the practice of nudging in a wide range of other conditions. The conclusion is that, when ethically legitimate, nudging offers an important new paradigm for informed consent, with a special potential to overcome the classical dilemma between paternalistic beneficence and respect for autonomy. (shrink)

CAN ONE SEE THE GIRL ONE LOVES, or one's deceased mother, in one's dreams? When one presses one's finger against one's eyeball, or when one has consumed large quantities of alcohol, does saying that one is seeing double correctly describe the experience? Then again, can one really see an approaching vessel on the radar screen, or hear Maria Callas on a record, or see the President on T.V.?

A longstanding debate exists in both academic literature and popular culture about whether non-informative marketing tactics are manipulative. However, given that we tend to believe that some marketing tactics are manipulative and some are not, the question that marketers, their critics, and consumers need to ask themselves is that of how to actually determine whether any particular marketing tactic is manipulative and whether a given manipulative tactic is, in fact, immoral. This article proposes to operationalize criteria that can be used (...) by marketers for making such determinations and attempts to provide some clarification toward our under- standing of the concept of manipulation and the conditions for the moral acceptability of manipulative marketing practices. It argues that a marketing tactic is manipulative if it is intended to motivate by undermining what the marketer believes is his/her audience’s normal decision-making process either by deception or by playing on a vulnerability that the marketer believes exists in his/her audience’s normal decision-making process. Such a tactic is morally objectionable on several grounds, which make it morally impermissible unless outweighed by sufficient “redemptive” moral considerations. (shrink)

Alan Turing’s 1950 imitation game has been widely understood as a means for testing if an entity is intelligent. Following a series of papers by Diane Proudfoot, I offer a socio-technological interpretation of Turing’s paper and present an alternative way of understanding both the imitation game and Turing’s concept of intelligence. Turing, I claim, saw intelligence as a social concept, meaning that possession of intelligence is a property determined by society’s attitude toward the entity. He realized that as long as (...) human society held a prejudiced attitude toward machinery—seeing machines a priori as mindless objects—machines could not be said to be intelligent, by definition. He also realized, though, that if humans’ a priori, chauvinistic attitude toward machinery changed, the existence of intelligent machines would become logically possible. Turing thought that such a change would eventually occur: He believed that when scientists overcome the technological challenge of constructing sophisticated machines that could imitate human verbal behavior—i.e., do well in the imitation game—humans’ prejudiced attitude toward machinery will have altered in such a way that machines could be said to be intelligent. The imitation game, for Turing, was not an intelligence test, but a technological aspiration whose realization would likely involve a change in society’s attitude toward machines. (shrink)

The late Shlomo Pines (1908-1990) was this century's outstanding historian of Islamic philosophy and science. This volume offers, for the first time in English. Pines' doctoral dissertation on Islamic atomism; the German version appeared in 1936. Pines presents the atomic theories of matter, time and space, as they are found in the literature of kalam, as well their exposition in the writings of Abŭ Bakr al - Râzî; and then investigates in detail possible sources in the Greek, Indian, and (...) other traditions. The present publication incorporates a few revisions which Pines himself had made in a draft translation. A number of the texts, which Pines consulted in the manuscript, have since been published, and some important studies on the kalam have appeared. Nonetheless, it can be stated in confidence that, sixty years after its first publication, Pines' monograph is till today the most significant work on the subject. (shrink)

Abraham ibn Ezra's scientific corpus represented an exceptional case: instead of the common Latin model embodied by the scholar coming from the Christian North to the Iberian Peninsula to initiate a translation enterprise, we have in Ibn Ezra the contrary case of an intellectual imbued with the Arabic culture, who abandons al-Andalus, roams around the Christian countries and delivers in his wandering through Italy, France and England, the scientific and cultural cargo that he amassed during his youth in al-Andalus. The (...) main purpose of this article is to provide a picture of Ibn Ezra's scientific corpus as comprehensive and detailed as possible given the present state of research. The paper will fall into two main parts: Ibn Ezra's scientific work will be broken up into three main genres: Mathematics, Astronomy, Scientific Instruments and Tools; The astrological encyclopaedia; Translations from Arabic into Hebrew. In the second part, Ibn Ezra's scientific corpus will be reassembled as a whole in order to provide a global characterization, trying to point out its general organization and shape, and to indicate its main aims and special traits revealing Ibn Ezra personal contribution. (shrink)

Relativists try to reduce the realistic notion of truth or make do without it. Rorty, e.g., regards 'true' as an indexical, or as a commendatory term; both construals result in contradictions. Dummett replaces truth by assertability, but that results in a vicious regress, making it impossible, first, to state the theory, and second, that nonomniscients know anything. Quine, rejecting meaning and reference altogether, ends with a picture of language that is a mere pattern of (e.g., vocal) interactions; by its own (...) light, that theory is incomprehensible and unjustifiable. Truth as correspondence to reality is therefore an irreducible notion. (shrink)

Wittgenstein is usually taken to have held that the use of a term is not mentally constrained. That is utterly wrong. A use of language unconstrained by meaning is attributed by him to "meaning-blind" or "aspect-blind" creatures, not to us. We observe meaning when an aspect dawns on us; meaning is the impression {Eindruck) of a term as fitting something; hence, unhke pain, it cannot stand alone. That is a mentalistic theory of meaning: use is determined by images {Vorstellungen) that (...) play semantic roles in virtue of their aesthetic properties. Although a term may be arbitrarily interpreted, aesthetic reasons determine which interpretation be seen as right for it. (shrink)

The author argues that what wittgenstein says in the "tractatus" about "the mystical" depends heavily upon what he says about facts, Objects, Logic, And language, And that any interpretation which introduces alien mystical doctrines to clarify his intentions misses the mark. To establish his thesis, He first examines wittgenstein's concepts of the world and the I as godheads. Within this metaphysical framework, He then discusses wittgenstein's ethical theory, Centering on his notions of happiness and the will, And considers the identity (...) of the ethical and the aesthetic in wittgenstein's early thought. (staff). (shrink)

The acclaimed and controversial historian turns his critical gaze on the writing of history today. Drawing on his four decades as a professional historian, Shlomo Sand interrogates the academic discipline of history, whose origin lay in the need for a national ideology. In the last few decades, traditional history has begun to fragment, yet only to give rise to a new role of historians as priests of official memory. Working in Israel has sharpened Sand's perspective, since the role of (...) history as national myth is particularly salient in a country where the Bible is treated as a history book. He asks such questions as: Is every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do political requirements and state power weigh down inordinately on historical research and teaching? And, in such conditions, can there be a morally neutral and 'scientific' truth? Despite his trenchant criticism of academic history, Sand would still like to believe that the past can be understood without myth, and sees pointers for this in the work of Weber and Sorel"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

“de-extinction” refers to the process of resurrecting extinct species by genetic methods. This science-fiction-sounding idea is in fact already in early processes of scientific implementation. Although this recent “revival of the dead” raises deep ethical questions, the ethics of de-extinction has barely received philosophical treatment. Rather than seeking a verdict for or against de-extinction, this paper attempts an overview and some novel analyses of the main ethical considerations. Five dimensions of the ethics of de-extinction are explored: (a) the possible contribution (...) of de-extinction to promoting ecological values, (b) the deontological argument that we owe de-extinction to species we rendered extinct, (c) the question of “playing God” through de-extinction, (d) the utilitarian perspective, and (e) the role of aesthetic considerations in the ethics of de-extinction. A general feature arising from the paper’s discussion is that, due to de-extinction’s special character, it repeatedly tests the limits of our ethical notions. (shrink)

Shlomo Pines The Philosophical Purport of Maimonides' Halachic Works and the Purport of The Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides' principal halachic works, ...

There is a disturbing kind of situation that presents agents with only two possibilities of moral action—one especially praiseworthy, the other condemnable. I describe such scenarios and argue that moral action in them exhibits a unique set of parameters: performing the commendable action is especially praiseworthy; not performing is not blameworthy; not performing is wrong. This set of parameters is distinct from those which characterize either moral obligation or supererogation. It is accordingly claimed that it defines a distinct, yet unrecognized, (...) deontic category, to which the name ‘Forced Supererogation’ is appropriate. The moral parameters of Forced Supererogation and the relations between them are discussed, especially the divergence of wrongness and blame. I argue that this new category allows a more accurate classification of moral actions than that imposed by the strained dichotomy of obligation versus supererogation. (shrink)

One of the fundamental enigmas of our existence, and for that matter, God's existence, is the act of creation. Has the cosmos been created ex nihilo or was it an intelligent design by God? Does God, having created the world, let it evolve and develop on its own, subject to the rules of evolution and chance; or does God intervene in every step of evolution in a deus ex machina manner? What is the role of man in creation? Is it (...) as central as existentialism and quantum mechanics assure us: that without human consciousness interacting with energy-matter, there would not be any objects and life forms? Is man the crown of creation permanently, or once evolution forms a more effective connecting agent between spirit and energy-matter, will man be relegated to the world of fossils? The book concludes with a thorough examination of human norms, values and morals. As such, this book constitutes a comprehensive treatise on the genesis of the world, the birth of God, and the role of man. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a shift in the approach to religious life among members of the Israeli Religious Zionist and the American Modern Orthodox communities. The trend towards spirituality, and to Hasidic teachings and practices in particular, is noteworthy and deserving of exploration. A range of leading American and Israeli thinkers - rabbis and philosophers, anthropologists and theologians - weigh in on these trends.

Weiner’s attribution theory of motivation and emotion assumes emotions are determined by beliefs about causality. Individuals share a naïve understanding of this linkage between causal attribution and emotions and use it in order to draw inferences from and influence others’ emotions. Evidence for such uses is provided and recent research and theory that goes beyond the attribution–emotion linkage is discussed. Specifically, recent research considers the naïve use of a larger set of emotions and appraisals and their connections, and the role (...) of context in this process. However, still missing is a fuller understanding when this naïve knowledge is employed and how and when it is based on an explicit understanding of the emotion–appraisal linkage rather than more automatic processes. (shrink)

In this book, Shlomo Biderman examines the views, outlooks, and attitudes of two distinct cultures: the West and classical India. He turns to a rich and varied collection of primary sources: the _Rg Veda_, the Upanishads, and texts by the Buddhist philosophers Någårjuna and Vasubandhu, among others. In studying the West, Biderman considers the Bible and its commentaries, the writings of such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, and Derrida, and the literature of Kafka, Melville, and Orwell. Additional sources (...) are Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ and seminal films like Ingmar Bergman's _Persona_. Biderman uses concrete examples from religion and literature to illustrate the formal aspects of the philosophical problems of transcendence, language, selfhood, and the external world and then demonstrates their plausibility in actual situations. Though his method of analysis is comparative, Biderman does not adopt the disinterested stance of an "ideal" spectator. Rather, Biderman approaches ancient Indian thought and culture from a Western philosophical standpoint to uncover cultural presuppositions that can be difficult to expose from within the culture in question. The result is a fascinating landmark in the study of Indian and Western thought. Through his comparative prism, Biderman explores the most basic ideas underlying human culture, and his investigation not only sheds light on India's philosophical traditions but also facilitates a deeper understanding of our own. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces the category of ‘non-deceptive manipulation that causes false beliefs’, analyzes how it narrows the traditional scope of ‘deception’, and draws moral implications.

section 1. Medical ethics -- section 2. Technology -- section 3. Social and business issues -- section 4. Ritual -- section 5. Women -- section 6. Israel -- section 7. Kashrut -- section 8. Jewish identity and marriage -- section 9. Shabbat and holiday.

We reviewed 272 phase I oncology trial consent forms and then created an improved informed consent template in both English and Spanish by redesigning and rewording the consent form to be specific to phase I trials, to avoid repetition, and to use simplified language, identifiable sections framed by first-person questions, and tables to present information. The resulting consent form template is shorter than average and considerably easier to read . The template also meets the recommended eighth-grade maximum reading level for (...) consent forms. Use of this template should help improve the informed consent process. (shrink)

You listen to a singer singing a lied. What you hear is a work of art, one work of art. But if it is a single work, whose work is it? The poet who wrote the words has created a work of art, but so did the composer, who wrote the music, and the singer, who is an artist in his own right. Each artist has created a work of art that is different from the other two. Yet how can (...) that be if you hear but a single work? How can three distinct works of art be one work, the one you now enjoy? (shrink)

The nocebo effect, the mirror-phenomenon to the placebo effect, is when the expectation of a negative outcome precipitates the corresponding symptom or leads to its exacerbation. One of the basic ethical duties in health care is to obtain informed consent from patients before treatment; however, the disclosure of information regarding potential complications or side effects that this involves may precipitate a nocebo effect. While dilemmas between the principles of respect for patient autonomy and of nonmaleficence are recognized in medical ethics, (...) there has not yet been an ethical discussion focused on the potential dilemma raised by the nocebo effect of informed consent. This dilemma is especially pernicious, since it involves a direct causality of harm by the caregiver that is unparalleled by other potential harmful effects of information disclosure. This paper articulates the dilemma of the NEIC and offers a seminal ethical analysis. (shrink)