This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere. The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links (...) between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and “the right to have rights” will be guaranteed; her conception of “the political” and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of political judgement has been a source of much scholarly investigation and debate in recent decades. Underlying the debate is the assumption that at least in her early writings, Arendt had an actor’s theory of judgement. In this article I challenge this common assumption. As I attempt to demonstrate, it relies on a misunderstanding, not only of Arendt’s conception of judgement, but also of her conception of agents in the public realm. Once we discard the assumption of (...) an actor’s theory of judgement, I argue, some important issues in Arendt’s theory of judgement are resolved, enabling us to perceive it as a unified, rather than self-contradictory, theory of judgement. (shrink)

In 2015, the Israeli Knesset passed the force-feeding act that permits the director of the Israeli prison authority to appeal to the district court with a request to force-feed a prisoner against his expressed will. A recent position paper by top Israeli clinicians and bioethicists, published in Hebrew, advocates for force-feeding by medical professionals and presents several arguments that this would be appropriate. Here, we first posit three interrelated questions: 1. Do prisoners have a right to hunger-strike? 2. Should governing (...) institutions force-feed prisoners and/or is it ethical to force-feed prisoners? 3. Should healthcare professionals force-feed prisoners? We then focus on the first and third questions. We first briefly provide several arguments to support the right of prisoners to refuse treatment. Next, we critically review the arguments presented in the Israeli position paper, demonstrating that they are all misguided at best. Lastly, we briefly present arguments against force-feeding by medical professionals. We conclude that healthcare providers should not participate in the force-feeding of prisoners. (shrink)

This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace (...) the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular. (shrink)

Three thousand belligerents, mostly belonging to the military arm of Hamas, stormed Southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. Along with 3,000 rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, these belligerents inva...

The importance of Hannah Arendt’s intellectual dialogue with her husband, Heinrich Blücher is widely acknowledged, yet it has rarely been systematically studied. In this paper, I use Blücher’s lectures to highlight the way some of his reflections and insights shed new light on Arendt’s political thought. Blücher, I seek to show, offers through the figure of Socrates an alternative under­standing of the meaning of philosophy and its relation to politics. His reflections help us see that Arendt worked with two conceptions (...) of philosophy: not only the dominant one in the Western philosophical tradition, of which she was famously critical, but also an alternative one in which philosophy and politics become mutually supportive, rather than mutually exclusive activities. What emerges from the comparison between Arendt’s and Blücher’s reflections on the relationship between philosophy and politics, I argue, is a joint and life-long commitment on the part of both to question the philosophical tradition in order to offer new theoretical foundations for participatory democratic citizenship. (shrink)

Using Madison Powers and Ruth Faden's definition of ‘well‐being,’ the authors argue that Israel, the international community and public health practitioners have a justice‐based obligation to assist the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Focusing on Palestinians in Gaza, the authors first outline a normative framework of justice, as articulated by Powers and Faden. Following Powers and Faden's assumption that empirical assessments of justice can be made using the six dimensions of well‐being, the authors next present current data on (...) the living conditions in Gaza and describe how these conditions prevent residents from achieving sufficient levels of well‐being. Using these indicators to demonstrate that Palestinians living in Gaza suffer deficiencies in these dimensions of well‐being, the authors present a strong argument from justice to assist the residents of Gaza. The medical, public health, and bioethics community cannot sit idle while injustice continues. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli government’s role in supporting living conditions conducive to health in the occupied Palestinian territories. Limiting the discussion to public health, the authors argue that—whether justified in its overall political policy—the Israeli government and people are legally and ethically obligated to care for the well-being of the Palestinian people. The authors first review the current situation in the OPT and compare health statistics with Israel. Next, the authors make three arguments as to why the Israeli government (...) and citizens should assist the Palestinian people: moral responsibility, legal responsibility and solidarity. Based on these, the authors make the case for Israel’s moral duty to ensure that Palestinian people living in the OPT achieve equitable levels of health as compared to Israeli citizens, while minimizing restrictions on Palestinian self-determination. The authors urge the Israeli government and citizens to improve Palestinian’s daily living conditions, tackle inequitable distribution of power and allow international support in these efforts. Hospital Admission must therefore be open to every patient that needs it, irrespective of whether he has money or not, whether he be Jew or heathen. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the way Judith Butler builds on Hannah Arendt’s political thought for her critique of Zionism. While her critique is valuable in many ways, I argue that it also obscures...

In this article we articulate a case from moral responsibility to assist Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). We contextualize this responsibility by focusing on access to healthcare and the provision of vaccines against COVID-19. We specifically present two arguments from responsibility, one that is global or cosmopolitan, and one that is country-specific. For the latter, we focus on Israel.

In this article we articulate a case from moral responsibility to assist Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). We contextualize this responsibility by focusing on access to healthcare and the provision of vaccines against COVID-19. We specifically present two arguments from responsibility, one that is global or cosmopolitan, and one that is country-specific. For the latter, we focus on Israel.

In this article we articulate a case from moral responsibility to assist Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). We contextualize this responsibility by focusing on access to healthcare and the provision of vaccines against COVID-19. We specifically present two arguments from responsibility, one that is global or cosmopolitan, and one that is country-specific. For the latter, we focus on Israel.

In this article, we describe in detail the health and general living conditions resulting from the ongoing armed conflict in Yemen, including the historical and geopolitical underpinnings. In addition to mere reporting, we use Yemen as a case study to examine the responsibility of bioethicists in general. We find it unacceptable that bioethics neglects the largest humanitarian crisis taking place in the world at the moment as well as the largest Cholera outbreak in history. We argue that bioethicists should do (...) more to address armed conflicts and their resulting basic human rights violations. We end with a few recommendations to prevent such neglect. (shrink)

Recent political developments in the West, particularly the emergence of right-wing populist leaders, have led quite a few political theorists to rethink the social and political conditions conduci...

Is it only yesterday's humanism, whether religious or secular in origin, that is dying - and is it really dying? - or is it more profoundly the very paradigm of humanity? At least it is worth asking the question. Do we not hear on every side today that everything is ‘constructed’ and ‘formated’? No inherited moral standard now seems acceptable, nor any reference to any sort of human nature or naturality. The only idea that henceforth finds acceptance is that of (...) the infinite plasticity of the human, leaving individuals free to shape themselves as they wish beyond any commonly received standard, since only defiance of the norm seems to be the source and proof of freedom. (shrink)

I respond to P. J. Ivanhoe's criticisms of my translation of a key passage in Wang Yangming.

This paper argues that a lonely death is, by definition, a bad death and that society as a whole, as well as individuals in society are obligated to assure a certain degree of well‐being, flourishing, or care among and for fellow individuals. Individuals can then be said to have a right against dying a lonely death. Such a right has corresponding duties. The paper further specifies what such duties may entail based on what individuals may need on their deathbed, specifically (...) focusing on the need for human touch. Assuming that human touch might indeed be needed by some individuals in order to avoid a lonely death, the paper explores potential implications from a public health perspective, particularly during infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID. (shrink)

The thinkers presented in these lectures by Bergman represent a radical departure from objectivism and subjectivism.

Standard models in epistemic game theory make strong assumptions about agents’ knowledge of their own beliefs. Agents are typically assumed to be introspectively omniscient: if an agent believes an event with probability p, she is certain that she believes it with probability p. This paper investigates the extent to which this assumption can be relaxed while preserving some standard epistemic results. Geanakoplos (1989) claims to provide an Agreement Theorem using the “truth” axiom, together with the property of balancedness, a significant (...) relaxation of introspective omniscience. I provide an example which shows that Geanakoplos’s statement is incorrect. I then introduce a new property, local balancedness, which allows us both to correct Geanakoplos’s result, and to extend it to cases where the truth axiom may fail. I exploit this general Agreement Theorem to provide novel epistemic conditions for correlated and Nash equilibrium, both of which relax the assumption of introspective omniscience. In all three cases, the results are also extended to infinite state spaces. (This is Chapter 5 of my 2014 Oxford DPhil (PhD) thesis.). (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...) epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

We provide a general argument against value incomparability, based on a new style of impossibility result. In particular, we show that, against plausible background assumptions, value incomparability creates an incompatibility between two very plausible principles for ranking lotteries: a weak "negative dominance" principle (to the effect that Lottery 1 can be better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2) and a weak form of ex ante Pareto (to (...) the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better prospect to some individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2). After spelling out our results, and the arguments based on them, we consider which principle the proponent of incomparability ought to reject. (shrink)

Timeless lessons are retold here with reverence and charm. The values that we all want our children to absorb - faith, kindness, forgiveness, charity - are made clear through traditional, biblical stories coupled with examples, and charming illustrations by Tova Katz. Shmuel Blitz, the author of five other successful children's books, goes back to the greatest source of all - the Torah and the Prophets. Do your children and grandchildren (and yourself) a favor and get them this fine new (...) book. (shrink)

The "German Socrates," Moses Mendelssohn was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for generations of Jews to master (...) the language of the larger culture.Feiner's book is the first that offers a full, human portrait of this fascinating man--uncommonly modest, acutely aware of his task as an intellectual pioneer, shrewd, traditionally Jewish, yet thoroughly conversant with the world around him--providing a vivid sense of Mendelssohn's daily life as well as of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a leading scholar of Jewish intellectual history, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a friend, as a tireless advocate for his people, and as an equally indefatigable spokesman for the paramount importance of intellectual independence. (shrink)

According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, which involves restricting the scope of the claim that (...) propositions are structured, so that it does not hold for all propositions whatsoever, but only for those which are expressible using closed sentences of a given formal language. We call this restricted principle Closed Structure, and show that it is consistent in classical higher-order logic. As a schematic principle, the strength of Closed Structure is dependent on the chosen language. For its consistency to be philosophically significant, it also needs to be consistent in every extension of the language which the theorist of structured propositions is apt to accept. But, we go on to show, Closed Structure is in fact inconsistent in a very natural extension of the standard language of higher-order logic, which adds resources for plural talk of propositions. We conclude that this particular strategy of restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured is not a compelling response to the argument based on Russell’s result, though we note that for some applications, for instance to propositional attitudes, a restricted thesis in the vicinity may hold some promise. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

"Ilana and Ari Goldreich set out on an unforettable quest through time ... and learn ... Jewish values in order to save the world from deadly peril" -- p. 4 of cover.

This book is the result of several decades of teaching experience in data structures and algorithms. It is self-contained but does assume some prior knowledge of data structures, and a grasp of basic programming and mathematics tools. Basic Concepts in Algorithms focuses on more advanced paradigms and methods combining basic programming constructs as building blocks and their usefulness in the derivation of algorithms. Its coverage includes the algorithms' design process and an analysis of their performance. It is primarily intended as (...) a textbook for the teaching of Algorithms for second-year undergraduate students in study fields related to computers and programming. Klein reproduces his oral teaching style in writing, with one topic leading to another, related one. Most of the classical and some more advanced subjects in the theory of algorithms are covered, though not in a comprehensive manner. The topics include Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming, Graph algorithms, probabilistic algorithms, data compression, numerical algorithms and intractability. Each chapter comes with its own set of exercises, and solutions to most of them are appended. (shrink)

Several theorists have observed that attitude reports have what we call “revisionist” uses. For example, even if Pete has never met Ann and has no idea that she exists, Jane can still say to Jim ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis in ten lessons’ if Pete believes all 6-year-olds can learn to play tennis in ten lessons and it is part of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge that Ann is a 6-year-old. Jane’s assertion seems acceptable because the claim (...) she reports Pete as believing is entailed by Pete’s beliefs if they are revised in light of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge. We provide a semantic theory of revisionist reports based on this idea. We observe that the admissible “revisions” are limited in a striking way. Jane cannot say ‘Pete thinks Ann is a 6-year-old and can play tennis in ten lessons’ in the same context that she can say ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis ten lessons’, even though this too follows from Jane and Jim’s background knowledge together with what Pete believes. Our theory predicts the infelicity of these latter reports. It also has the resources to predict the truth of “exported” attitude reports and casts the relationship between these reports and “singular thought” in a new light. We conclude by discussing how revisionist reports make trouble for a simplistic view of the connection between the relations expressed by attitude verbs in natural language and the relations of most interest to philosophers of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

Political honors are ubiquitous in public life, whether in the form of public monuments, street names, or national holidays. Yet such honors have received scant attention from normative political theorists. Tackling this gap, I begin by criticizing a desert-based approach to political honors. I then argue that morally appropriate honors are best understood as marking and reinforcing the moral commitments of the collective in whose name they are being awarded. I show how this thesis clarifies and organizes core intuitions regarding (...) a variety of honors, from those commemorating slave-owning founders of the United States to the Nobel Peace Prize. (shrink)

One Health is a novel paradigm that recognizes that human and non-human animal health is interlinked through our shared environment. Increasingly prominent in public health responses to zoonoses, OH differs from traditional approaches to animal-borne infectious risks, because it also aims to promote the health of animals and ecological systems. Despite the widespread adoption of OH, culling remains a key component of institutional responses to the risks of zoonoses. Using the threats posed by highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to human (...) and animal health, economic activity and food security as a case exemplar, we explore whether culling and other standard control measures for animal-borne infectious disease might be justified as part of OH approaches. Our central premise is that OH requires us to reformulate ‘health’ as universal good that is best shared across species boundaries such that human health and well-being are contingent upon identifying and meeting the relevant sets of human and non-human interests and shared dependencies. Our purpose is to further nascent discussions about the ethical dimensions of OH and begin to describe the principles around which a public health agenda that truly seeks to co-promote human and non-human health could potentially begin to be implemented. (shrink)

We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference does not reconcile a classical logic of identity with apparent counterexamples to it involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs.

The poet and author Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92) was one of the key figures who promoted the Haskalah (The Jewish Enlightenment) among the large Jewish population in Eastern Europe in the second hal...

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) wrote Jerusalem with his back to the wall. His Jewish identity and liberal outlook were challenged in the public sphere of the German Enlightenment, and this was his last opportunity to write a book that would perpetuate the essence of his faith and his values as the first modern Jewish humanist. The work, which moves between apologetics for his faith and political and religious philosophy was primarily a daring essay that categorically denied the rule of religion and (...) advocated tolerance and freedom of thought. Neither the state nor the church had the right to govern a person’s conscience; and, no less far-reaching and pioneering: these values are consistent with Judaism. In the summer of 1783, seven years after the resounding voice of protest against tyranny and in favor of liberty and equality was heard in the American Declaration of Independence, less than six years before the French Revolution, but only two years and two months before his death, the man who was called the “German Socrates,” a highly prominent figure in the Enlightenment, published one of the fundamental documents in Jewish modernity. (shrink)