This book explores the philosophy of love through the thought and life of Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph. Readers of the Talmud are introduced to Rabbi Akiva through the iconic story of his love for his wife Rachel. From this starting point, Naftali Rothenberg conducts a thorough examination of the harmonious approach to love in the obstacle-laden context of human reality. Discussing the deterioration of passion into simple lust, the ability to contend with suffering and death, and so forth, Rothenberg (...) addresses the deepest and most pressing questions about human love. The readings and observations offered here allow readers to acquire the wisdom of love-not merely as an assemblage of theoretical arguments and abstract statements, but as an analysis of the internal contradictions and difficulties revealed in the context of attempts to realize and implement harmonious love. (shrink)

The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading, treating deconstruction's weak, fragile and parasitic mode of thinking as a deconstruction of emotion, on emotion and as emotion. Chronicle of Separation examines these themes beginning with a descriptive (...) and an analytic reading of Derrida's Memoirs: For Paul de Man and The Post Card, as embodiments of deconstruction's melancholic friendship which inscribes its disillusioned love in what it calls the 'postal condition'. The book then moves on to a feminization of Derrida, experimenting in different modes of writing. It firstly discusses Fred Zinneman's film Julia about a mournful friendship between women. Then it performs a deconstructive meditation on the anorexic person suggesting that anorexia constitutes a paradoxical embodiment of deconstruction. The concluding chapter presents a complete incorporation of Derrida into a fictional text that re-writes the biblical Book of Ruth. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1. Dine birkot ha-nehenin--ḥeleḳ 2. Ṭohorat ha-lashon ṿeha-nefesh--ḥeleḳ 3. Dine teḥilat ha-yom--ḥeleḳ 4. Dine tefilat ha-shaḥar--ḥeleḳ 5. Neśiʼat-kapayim ṿe-taḥanun--ḥeleḳ 6. Dine ḳeriʼat ha-Torah--ḥeleḳ 7. Sheʼar tefilot ha-yom--ḥeleḳ 8. Tefilah be-Shabat uve-moʻed--ḥeleḳ 9. Dine Yamim Noraʼim--ḥeleḳ 10. Dine Ḥanukah u-Furim--ḥeleḳ 11. Mafteaḥ kelali meforaṭ.

In the context of the end of life, many authors point out how the experience of identity is crucial for the well-being of patients with advanced disease. They define this identity in terms of autonomy, control, or dependence, associating these concepts with the sense of personal dignity. From the perspective of the phenomenology of embodiment, Kay Toombs and other authors have investigated the ways disease can impact on the subjective world of patients and have stressed that a consideration of this (...) personal world can promote understanding and recognition of their experience. Based on the findings of qualitative studies of the perception of dignity and autonomy in patients at the end of life, this analysis assesses concepts such as being-in-the-world in illness, embodiment, lived body versus objective body or the gaze of the other from a Toombsian phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

En este artículo se parte de la distinción aristotélica de cuatro formas fundamentales de acción: enérgeia-kínesis (de la Metafísica) y praxis—poiesis (de la Ética) y de las aportaciones de L. Polo en sus obras de Teoría del Conocimiento y de Ética, especialmente, de sus conceptos de operación inmanente y movimiento transitivo, para establecer una tipología con las cuatro formas fundamentales de un dinamismo: proceso (kinesis), operación (enérgeia), acción (praxis) y producción (poiesis).

Victor Hugo a soutenu : « Dieu, cela n’est pas tant que ce n’est pas en pierre / Il faut une maison pour mettre la prière. » L’histoire de l’incarnation christique suffit-elle à expliquer la place de la pierre dans l’imaginaire des sociétés culturellement issues du christianisme? En quoi l’Église – la communauté et l’institution nées de l’enseignement du Christ – poursuit-elle ce projet d’inscription de la chair dans la pierre? Dans quelle mesure la parole de Jésus à l’un de (...) ses apôtres, Pierre – « tu es Pierre et sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon Église » (Mt. xvi, 18) – est-elle fondatrice non seulement de la « pétrification » de l’Église, mais plus généralement du poids donné à l’architecture et au bâti dans les mille et une façons occidentales de penser la société et de faire communauté? (shrink)

Studies that have explored the wish to hasten death (WTHD) in patients with advanced illness have found that the feeling of being a burden may trigger WTHD. Research suggests that both the feeling and the wish are indicators of multidimensional suffering whose meaning may depend on the patient's biographical background. Therefore, we carried out a systematic review and meta‐ethnography. Fourteen qualitative studies, reported in 16 articles, met the inclusion criteria. The analysis identified two themes: the personal and social dimensions that (...) could help to explain the feeling of being a burden in these patients. These dimensions reveal how this feeling is linked to physical, psychological/emotional, existential and social factors. The feeling of being a burden cannot be understood without considering patients’ personal interpretation of their dependency or care needs, and hence it is also necessary to understand their biographical background. Such an understanding is crucial to inform clinical policies based on the moral duty to provide all patients with humane care. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for patients with advanced disease to express a wish to hasten death. Qualitative studies of the WTHD have found that such a wish may have different meanings, none of which can be understood outside of the patient’s personal and sociocultural background, or which necessarily imply taking concrete steps to ending one’s life. The starting point for the present study was a previous systematic review of qualitative studies of the WTHD in advanced patients. Here we analyse in (...) greater detail the statements made by patients included in that review in order to examine their moral understandings and representations of illness, the dying process and death. We identify and discuss four classes of assumptions: assumptions related to patients’ moral understandings in terms of dignity, autonomy and authenticity; assumptions related to social interactions; assumptions related to the value of life; and assumptions related to medicalisation as an overarching context within which the WTHD is expressed. Our analysis shows how a philosophical perspective can add to an understanding of the WTHD by taking into account cultural and anthropological aspects of the phenomenon. We conclude that the knowledge gained through exploring patients’ experience and moral understandings in the end-of-life context may serve as the basis for care plans and interventions that can help them experience their final days as a meaningful period of life, restoring some sense of personal dignity in those patients who feel this has been lost. (shrink)

Within the causal modeling literature, debates about the Causal Faithfulness Condition have concerned whether it is probable that the parameters in causal models will have values such that distinct causal paths will cancel. As the parameters in a model are fixed by the probability distribution over its variables, it is initially puzzling what it means to assign probabilities to these parameters. I propose that to assign a probability to a parameter in a model is to treat that parameter as a (...) function of a variable in an augmented model. By combining this proposal with widely adopted principles regarding which variables must be included in a model, I argue that the various proposed counterexamples to CFC involving coordinated parameters are not genuine counterexamples. I then consider the cases in which CFC fails due not to coordination, but by coincidence, and propose explanatory and predictive bases for ruling out such coincidences without presuming that they are improbable. The aim of the proposed defenses is not to show that CFC never fails, but rather to argue that its use in a particular context may be defended using general modeling assumptions rather than by relying on claims about how often it fails. (shrink)

A common strategy for simplifying complex systems involves partitioning them into subsystems whose behaviors are roughly independent of one another at shorter timescales. Dynamic causal models clarify how doing so reveals a system’s nonequilibrium causal relationships. Here I use these models to elucidate the idealizations and abstractions involved in representing a system at a timescale. The models reveal that key features of causal representations—such as which variables are exogenous—may vary with the timescale at which a system is considered. This has (...) implications for debates regarding which systems can be represented causally. (shrink)

A cause may influence its effect via multiple paths. Paradigmatically (Hesslow [1974]), taking birth control pills both decreases one’s risk of thrombosis by preventing pregnancy and increases it by producing a blood chemical. Building on Pearl ([2001]), I explicate the notion of a path-specific effect. Roughly, a path-specific effect of C on E via path P is the degree to which a change in C would change E were they to be transmitted only via P. Facts about such effects may (...) be gleaned from the structural equations commonly used to represent the causal relationships among variables. I contrast my analysis of the Hesslow case with those given by theorists of probabilistic causality, who mistakenly link it to issues of causal heterogeneity, token-causation and indeterminism. The reason probabilistic theories misdiagnose this case is that they pay inadequate attention to the structural relationships among variables. (shrink)

Discussions of the causal status of race focus on the question of whether race itself can be experimentally manipulated. Yet many experiments testing for racial discrimination do not manipulate race, but rather a signal by which race influences an outcome. Such signal manipulations are easily formalized, though contexts of discrimination introduce significant philosophical complications. Whether a signal counts as a signal for race is not merely a causal question, but depends on sociological and normative issues regarding discrimination. The notion of (...) signal manipulation enables one to take these issues into account while still using causal counterfactual tests to detect discrimination. The analysis provided here is compatible with social constructivism and helps differentiate between cases in which it is more or less fruitful to model race causally. (shrink)

Some recent accounts of constitutive relevance have identified mechanism components with entities that are causal intermediaries between the input and output of a mechanism. I argue that on such accounts there is no distinctive inter-level form of mechanistic explanation and that this highlights an absence in the literature of a compelling argument that there are such explanations. Nevertheless, the entities that these accounts call ‘components’ do play an explanatory role. Studying causal intermediaries linking variables Xand Y provides knowledge of the (...) counterfactual conditions under which X will continue to bring about Y. This explanatory role does not depend on whether intermediate variables count as components. The question of whether there are distinctively mechanistic explanations remains open. (shrink)

The essay examines Scholem's letter-confession on the Hebrew language addressed to Rosenzweig from two perspectives hitherto ignored in the ongoing interpretative consideration of this document: Scholem's repression of the literary space and his consequent exclusion of madness. The essay follows several threads in Derrida's own ‘internal’ reading of the letter, and leans on other Derridean writings such as The Monolingualism of the Other, Schibboleth: For Paul Celan and ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in order to suggest two distinct encounters (...) between Derrida and Scholem: In the first encounter, Scholem reads Derrida and proves to be deconstructing his own notions of secular and profane Hebrew, while fighting in vain for his sanity by clinging to liturgical practices against the grain of an ongoing ‘actualization’, politicization or else fictionalization of the sacred language. In the second encounter, it is Derrida who reads Scholem. By transforming the particular conditions of possibility of Hebrew into general conditions of possibility of every language contaminated by a theological-political tension, Derrida contributes some important insights for contemporary Hebrew speakers. (shrink)

Dynamical models of cognition have played a central role in recent cognitive science. In this paper, we consider a common strategy by which dynamical models describe their target systems neither as purely static nor as purely dynamic, but rather using a hybrid approach. This hybridity reveals how dynamical models involve representational choices that are important for understanding the relationship between dynamical and non-dynamical representations of a system.