The stability theory of first order theories was initiated by Saharon Shelah in 1969. The classification of abstract elementary classes was initiated by Shelah, too. In several papers, he introduced non-forking relations. Later, Shelah [17, II] introduced the good non-forking frame, an axiomatization of the non-forking notion.We improve results of Shelah on good non-forking frames, mainly by weakening the stability hypothesis in several important theorems, replacing it by the almost λ-stability hypothesis: The number of types over a model of cardinality (...) λ is at most λ+.We present conditions on Kλ, that imply the existence of a model in Kλ+n for all n. We do this by providing sufficiently strong conditions on Kλ, that they are inherited by a properly chosen subclass of Kλ+. What are these conditions? We assume that there is a ‘non-forking’ relation which satisfies the properties of the non-forking relation on superstable first order theories. Note that here we deal with models of a fixed cardinality, λ.While in Shelah [17, II] we assume stability in λ, so we can use brimmed models, here we assume almost stability only, but we add an assumption: The conjugation property.In the context of elementary classes, the superstability assumption gives the existence of types with well-defined dimension and the ω-stability assumption gives the existence and uniqueness of models prime over sets. In our context, the local character assumption is an analog to superstability and the density of the class of uniqueness triples with respect to the relation ≼bs is the analog to ω-stability. (shrink)

The notion $J$ is independent in $(M,M_0,N)$ was established by Shelah, for an AEC (abstract elementary class) which is stable in some cardinal $\lambda$ and has a non-forking relation, satisfying the good $\lambda$-frame axioms and some additional hypotheses. Shelah uses independence to define dimension. Here, we show the connection between the continuity property and dimension: if a non-forking satisfies natural conditions and the continuity property, then the dimension is well-behaved. As a corollary, we weaken the stability hypothesis and two additional (...) hypotheses, that appear in Shelah's theorem. (shrink)

In their cognitive theory of emotion, Schachter and Singer proposed that feelings are separable from what they are about. As a test, they induced feelings of arousal by injecting epinephrine and then molded them into different emotions. They illuminated how feelings in one moment lead into the next to form a stream of conscious experience. We examine the construction of emotion in a similar spirit. We use the sensory integration process to understand how the brain combines disparate sources of information (...) to construct both perceptual and emotional models of the world even as the world continues to change. We emphasize two processes: affect segmentation and affect integration. (shrink)

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the (...) mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1. (shrink)

Although random mutation is central to models of evolutionary change, a lack of clarity remains regarding the conceptual possibilities for thinking about the nature and role of mutation in evolution. We distinguish several claims at the intersection of mutation, evolution, and directionality and then characterize a previously unrecognized category: complex conditioned mutation. Empirical evidence in support of this category suggests that the historically famous fluctuation test should be revisited, and new experiments should be undertaken with emerging experimental techniques to facilitate (...) detecting mutation rates within specific loci at an ultra‐high, individual base pair resolution. (shrink)

The study suggests a model for understanding inter-group relations which has combined two psycho-social concepts: perceptions of collective narratives :26–38, 2002) and identity strategies . The model examined two minority groups of Israeli citizens: Palestinian Muslims and Christians, with a representative sample of 1,164 Muslims and 805 Christians, all Israeli citizens, aged 18–65. We used questionnaires which were developed and adapted for the unique population in this study. As expected, members of both groups mostly endorsed integration strategy. Stronger willingness for (...) competition and separation, as well as lower acceptance of the “other” collective narratives, were found among Christian participants compared to their Muslim counterparts. The expected pattern of inter-relations between the two psychosocial concepts was found: integration and assimilation strategies were related to higher rates of acceptance of the out-group collective narratives and to lower levels of legitimization of in-group collective narratives. In the same vein, the opposite pattern was found in the relations between strategies of competition and separation and the perceptions of collective narratives. The discussion focuses on the contribution of the theoretical model and the findings of our study to a better understanding of the complicated inter-group relations between Palestinian Muslims and Christians who are citizens of Israel. (shrink)

The ArgumentMontaigne'sEssayswere an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaigne's private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind ofheterotopiain which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaigne's self (...) as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaigne's library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaigne's skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the author's position and of the identity of the self. (shrink)

One of the central arguments against redistribution through private law is its inefficiency due to the double-distortion phenomenon that accompanies it. I argue that in a subset of cases—in which there is uncertainty regarding the fairness principle that should be accepted in the realm of private law—it may be required to take into account redistributive considerations even if one generally accepts the double-distortion argument. I assert that while side-constraints may apply to direct redistribution, they do not apply to the role (...) of redistributive considerations in determining which of the fairness principles should be accepted in the realm of private law. As a consequence, some distributive patterns could be achieved only by taking into account redistributive considerations in the realm of private law. I argue that redistributive considerations may tilt the scales toward accepting the fairness principle with the lower credence of being true. (shrink)

One of the most significant, incontestable, and relatively ignored aspects of modernity is the new role states play as generators and facilitators of disasters, on the one hand, and as authors — or at least facilitators, sponsors, and coordinators — of survival and relief operations, on the other hand. The relation of the modern state to disaster has played an important role in the emergence of the state as a "totalizing totality" and in the constitution of its image as a (...) historical subject. This Article argues that state’s relation to disaster and its unfolding consequences has developed in two opposite directions that should be distinguished carefully. In line with these two opposite relations to disaster, I suggest a theoretical distinction between two state formations: a providential state and a catastrophic state. This distinction is based on Agamben’s concept of "bare life," which a sovereign may forsake by declaring an exception but which it may also save by taking extraordinary measures of protection or relief. The Article examines two aspects of the difference between the two state formations. From a formal point of view, it distinguishes and discusses two different notions of sovereignty, its authority, foundation, and legitimacy, along with two different understandings of the subjectivity of the state. These two conceptions involve and are intimately related to two distinct sets of theological presuppositions and two different conceptions of the political. From a chronological point of view, the Article sketches two diverging genealogies that go back to distinct, even if related, moments in the history of the modern West. Recognizing the fact that in certain historical moments these two genealogies were intertwined and that in our time this intertwinement has yielded a rapid process of hybridization, the Article claims that this process is not dialectical, and that the difference between the two genealogies should be maintained for theoretical and political reasons alike. (shrink)

Under the title The Reformation of Morals , the tenth-century Syrian Orthodox scholar Yahya ibn 'Adi offered encouragement to the effort to promote moral perfection, especially among kings and other members of the social elite: his tract, on the social virtues and vices, gives extensive advice about the cultivation of the former and the extirpation of the latter. Where there are many echoes of Hellenistic moral philosophy in his presentation, the topical profile of the work and the language the author (...) uses reveal his participation in the Baghdad circle of philosophers and intellectuals--both Christian and Muslim--who were responsible for much that has come to be regarded as typical of the classical culture of the Islamic world. In fact, this text has occasionally been attributed to one or another famous Muslim author. It now stands as an important Christian contribution, in Arabic, to a strand of moral philosophy that is an integral component of the intellectual tradition of the world of Islam. (shrink)

SAT's most recent publication, this English translation from the original Sankrit by Adi Sankara is a very clear, aphoristic explanation of what the self is and the Knowledge that reveals.

A critical edition of "Tahdhīb Al-Akhlāq", a treatise ascribed to the Jacobite theologian, logician, and translator in Abbasid period, Yahya ibn Adi.

This article puts forth a novel framework for understanding conceptions of disability using six models of disability: the “Social,” “Medical,” “Tragedy,” “Affirmative,” “Minority” and “Universal” models. It analyzes these models as three opposed pairs, each pertaining to a distinct aspect of the multifaceted experience of disability: (1) the cause of disabled people’s social disadvantage and exclusion; (2) the effect of impairment on individuals’ quality of life and well-being; (3) the dichotomy or lack thereof between disabled and nondisabled people. The article (...) argues that although each model is incompatible with its opposed pair, it is compatible with the remaining four models, in the sense that there is no contradiction in holding the views associated with these models at the same time. It therefore concludes that conceptions of disability are best understood as clusters of views on disability that are associated with compatible models. (shrink)

We point out some connections between existence of homogenous sets for certain edge colorings and existence of branches in certain trees. As a consequence, we get that any locally additive coloring (a notion introduced in the paper) of a cardinal κ has a homogeneous set of size κ provided that the number of colors μ satisfies. Another result is that an uncountable cardinal κ is weakly compact if and only if κ is regular, has the tree property, and for each (...) there exists such that every tree of height μ with λ nodes has less than branches. (shrink)

This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo Strauss’ immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young Strauss’ worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing (...) those aspects of his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss’s intellectual biography. By analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar America through reading Strauss’ The City and Man as a representative of his political teaching. (shrink)

This book offers an original and detailed reading of Plato's _Republic_, one of the most influential philosophical works in the emergence of Western philosophy. The author discusses the _Republic_ in terms of discursive events and political acts. Plato's act is placed in the context of a politico-discursive crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century B.C that gave rise to the dialogue's primary question, that of justice. The originality of Dr. Ophir lies (...) in the way he reconstructs the _Republic's_ different spatial settings - utopian, mythical, dramatic and discursive - using them as the main thread of his interpretation. Against the background of Plato's critique of the organisation of civic-space in the Greek _polis_, the author relates the spatial settings in the Plato text to each other. This provides a basis for a re-examination of the relationship between philosophy and politics, which Plato's work advocates, and which it actually enacted. (shrink)

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another (...) imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics is a cover-to-cover translation of the Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta imeni V.A. Steklova of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Each issue ordinarily contains either one book-length article or a collection of articles pertaining to the same topic.

The essay proposes an unexpected alliance between two of the figures assembled in the impressive intellectual constellation Benhabib presents in her new book: Albert O. Hirschman and Judith Butler. Hirschman’s model of ‘exit, voice, loyalty’ is used to interpret and justify the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IS HUME A SCEPTIC ABOUT INDUCTION? On a Would-be Revolution in the Interpretation of Hume's Philosophy The history of philosophy does not abound with great philosophers. But the number of those whose preoccupation is with the interpretation of the great philosophers' works is overwhelming. It is not surprising, therefore, that time and again we come upon arguments to the effect that a great philosopher has never been properly understood. (...) What, after all, could better justify one in adding still another paper or book to the number of works published yearly on any great philosopher, than the claim that one put forward a new interpretation; and what could be a more revolutionary interpretation than that which claims that a certain philosophy has been misunderstood altogether. This is not to say that real revolutions in the interpretation of major philosophical works are a priori precluded. It could possibly happen that generations of scholars have again and again been mistaken as to a philosopher's basic intentions. But one should certainly check and double-check any such revolutionary interpretation lest one fall a victim to it. In what follows I shall discuss a recent revolutionary interpretation concerning Hume's attitude toward induction. Hume scholars in the past have been at variance over many a question, but they all agreed that Hume was the first to present the problem of the justification of induction systematically. They also agreed that Hume tried to prove that induction cannot be justified: there is no convincing argument which could (without begging the question) demonstrate that inductively based predictions and theories are reasonable. According to this traditional view Hume's attitude to induction was of course sceptical. But lately T. Beauchamp and T. Mappes argued that this view was totally mistaken. They claim that Hume never grappled with the problem which came to be called the problem of the justification of induction; actually it does not appear in his writings. The view that Hume was bent on proving the impossibility of such a justification is simply erroneous. According to these philosophers had Hume discussed this problem at all he might well have either argued with Strawson that it was a pseudo-problem or tried with Reichenbach to justify induction pragmatically. If this interpretation is correct, we must conclude that the traditional view of Hume as a sceptical philosopher who denied the rationality of inductive inferences is false to the 2 point of being a mere fabrication. I shall analyse here some of the arguments advanced by Beauchamp and Mappes in order to expose some of their weak points. I shall try to show that however revolutionary their interpretation, it is only a would-be revolution. If I still find it worthwhile to discuss it at length, it is because their interpretation - as erroneous as it is raises a very important question about the consistency of Hume's philosophy. My aim is not merely to expose some of the vulnerable points of what I shall call the "revolutionary interpretation" but also to deal with the fundamental question it raises. II Beauchamp and Mappes argue that it never occurred to Hume to dispute the rationality of induction. He could doubt whether certain inductive inferences could pass the test of the established institutional standards of inductive reasoning, but the "external problem" of the justifiability of the entire institution of inductive reasoning was never raised by him. This interpretation is based on two kinds of arguments: the one, a general argument, has to do with the principles of Hume's philosophy and the other with textual considerations. According to the general argument the traditional view that Hume doubted the rationality of the empiricalinductive method is incompatible with well-known facts about Hume, such as his use of this very method, or his assertion that it was the major innovation of the Treatise. "Are we to believe", Beauchamp and Mappes ask, "that the most influential figure in modern empiricism, who wrote a Treatise using the empirical method, binds himself to a procedure whose conclusions cannot be given rational justification of any kind?"3 The textual underpinnings of the revolutionary interpretation are of two kinds: on the negative side it is maintained that... (shrink)

A new moral theory from an Israeli philosopher and activist emphasizing theexistential and political nature of evil.

Kierkegaard's philosophy is the description of the structure and behavior of human consciousness. Adi Shmüeli reconstructs that philosophy by showing that it always reflects the structure in question, and thus provides a useful key to Kierkegaard's work. Mr. Shmüeli approaches his task by analyzing first the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of life as successive steps in the gradual awakening of consciousness. He then describes the alienation of consciousness, of which Kierkegaard speaks in all his works, and discusses Kierkegaard's theory (...) of indirect communication, philosophical action whose aim is to awaken consciousness in order to rescue it from alienation. Studying Kierkegaard's observations on Christianity as indirect communication, Professor Shmüeli deals also with his reflections on the philosophical problem of truth. His concluding chapter discusses the temporality and historicity of human consciousness. Quotations, taken primarily from accessible English translations, are generously provided to put the reader in direct contact with Kierkegaard's own words. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The ideas of freedom, justice, democracy and secularism are the main themes in the study of political philosophy. This article attempts to explain Abdolkarim Soroush's political philosophy with the boundaries of themes regarding freedom, justice, secluralism and democracy. Abolkarim Soroush is a thinker in the contemporary Islamic world.

In this essay, the authors explore the phenomenon of utterance we find in speech and teaching. Jean-Luc Marion’s third phenomenological reduction serves as a methodological foundation for this exploration which moves through Biblical literature and autobiography – both centred on the story of the election of Samuel – before leading into a meditation on the Call of and Response to the Other. The Call and Response guide the essay to a theory of prophetic teaching emerging within its phenomenology of utterance (...) that situates itself between philosophical anthropology and philosophical theology, and between Jewish and Catholic traditions. (shrink)