We revisit the analogy suggested by Madelung between a non-relativistic time-dependent quantum particle, to a fluid system which is pseudo-barotropic, irrotational and inviscid. We first discuss the hydrodynamical properties of the Madelung description in general, and extract a pressure like term from the Bohm potential. We show that the existence of a pressure gradient force in the fluid description, does not violate Ehrenfest’s theorem since its expectation value is zero. We also point out that incompressibility of the fluid implies conservation (...) of density along a fluid parcel trajectory and in 1D this immediately results in the non-spreading property of wave packets, as the sum of Bohm potential and an exterior potential must be either constant or linear in space. Next we relate to the hydrodynamic description a thermodynamic counterpart, taking the classical behavior of an adiabatic barotopric flow as a reference. We show that while the Bohm potential is not a positive definite quantity, as is expected from internal energy, its expectation value is proportional to the Fisher information whose integrand is positive definite. Moreover, this integrand is exactly equal to half of the square of the imaginary part of the momentum, as the integrand of the kinetic energy is equal to half of the square of the real part of the momentum. This suggests a relation between the Fisher information and the thermodynamic like internal energy of the Madelung fluid. Furthermore, it provides a physical linkage between the inverse of the Fisher information and the measure of disorder in quantum systems—in spontaneous adiabatic gas expansion the amount of disorder increases while the internal energy decreases. (shrink)

We define infinitary extensions to classical epistemic logic systems, and add also a common belief modality, axiomatized in a finitary, fixed-point manner. In the infinitary K system, common belief turns to be provably equivalent to the conjunction of all the finite levels of mutual belief. In contrast, in the infinitary monotonic system, common belief implies every transfinite level of mutual belief but is never implied by it. We conclude that the fixed-point notion of common belief is more powerful than the (...) iterative notion of common belief. (shrink)

In _Secular Grace_ Dana Freibach-Heifetz addresses the crisis of modernity, proposing an ethic of love based on a new philosophical concept of “secular grace" as intersubjective relations.

The Madelung equations map the non-relativistic time-dependent Schrödinger equation into hydrodynamic equations of a virtual fluid. While the von Neumann entropy remains constant, we demonstrate that an increase of the Shannon entropy, associated with this Madelung fluid, is proportional to the expectation value of its velocity divergence. Hence, the Shannon entropy may grow due to an expansion of the Madelung fluid. These effects result from the interference between solutions of the Schrödinger equation. Growth of the Shannon entropy due to expansion (...) is common in diffusive processes. However, in the latter the process is irreversible while the processes in the Madelung fluid are always reversible. The relations between interference, compressibility and variation of the Shannon entropy are then examined in several simple examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for classical diffusive processes, the “force” accelerating diffusion has the form of the positive gradient of the quantum Bohm potential. Expressing then the diffusion coefficient in terms of the Planck constant reveals the lower bound given by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in terms of the product between the gas mean free path and the Brownian momentum. (shrink)

This paper presents a philosophical reading of “The Idiot”, which perceives its main protagonist, Prince Myshkin, as a literary hero who chooses the path of generosity. The paper exposes Dostoevsky’s generosity-ethics against the background of Christian ethics, virtue ethics, and the Nietzschean notion of generosity; it further analyzes the problematic aspects of Myshkin’s version of generosity-ethics, and discusses several possible explanations of its catastrophic outcomes in the novel. The paper consists of three parts. The first part presents the rich and (...) profound sense that Dostoevsky gives to generosity-ethics in the novel, while showing the good it may bring to one’s life. The second part exposes the dangers and the limits of generosity-ethics, because of which the Prince may be referred to as “an idiot”. The third and final part reevaluates generosity-ethics, discusses its relation to reason, and puts forth another version of generosity-ethics that may overcome most of the flaws in Myshkin’s generosity. Offering such a philosophical reading of this great literary work of art, the paper also says some things about the relation between philosophy and literature, and aims at a fruitful dialogue between the two. (shrink)

This paper presents a philosophical reading of The Idiot , which perceives its main protagonist, Prince Myshkin, as a literary hero who chooses the path of generosity. The paper exposes Dostoevsky’s generosity-ethics against the background of Christian ethics, virtue ethics, and the Nietzschean notion of generosity; it further analyzes the problematic aspects of Myshkin’s version of generosity-ethics, and discusses several possible explanations of its catastrophic outcomes in the novel. The paper consists of three parts. The first part presents the rich (...) and profound sense that Dostoevsky gives to generosity-ethics in the novel, while showing the good it may bring to one’s life. The second part exposes the dangers and the limits of generosity-ethics, because of which the Prince may be referred to as an idiot . The third and final part reevaluates generosity-ethics, discusses its relation to reason, and puts forth another version of generosity-ethics that may overcome most of the flaws in Myshkin’s generosity. Offering such a philosophical reading of this great literary work of art, the paper also says some things about the relation between philosophy and literature, and aims at a fruitful dialogue between the two. (shrink)

Ramat Gan Academic Center of Law and Business, Israel This article aims to expose the philosophical and cultural mechanisms, which allow some forms of western religion (in this case mainstream Christianity) to join hands with western capitalism in the oppression of women and of the needy. Focusing on the example of the USA, this article claims that both mainstream Christian religion and capitalism perpetuate and entrench discrimination against women and the oppression of the needy through the use of the cultural/philosophical (...) dichotomy between love and justice and its corollary dichotomy between private and public. Against this background, the second part of the article examines several notions of love and justice, and offers a philosophical alternative to the dichotomous understanding of the two which is based on our claim that neither love nor justice is complete without the other and suggests a combined understanding of these concepts. Finally, the article examines the practical implications of such a theoretical alternative for the social and cultural structures of the capitalist state, religion and the family. Key Words: capitalism • family • feminist ethics • justice • love • private • public • religion • United States • welfare state. (shrink)

It is known that a theory in S5‐epistemic logic with several agents may have numerous models. This is because each such model specifies also what an agent knows about infinite intersections of events, while the expressive power of the logic is limited to finite conjunctions of formulas. We show that this asymmetry between syntax and semantics persists also when infinite conjunctions (up to some given cardinality) are permitted in the language. We develop a strengthened S5‐axiomatic system for such infinitary logics, (...) and prove a strong completeness theorem for them. Then we show that in every such logic there is always a theory with more than one model. (shrink)

Ethical questions in medicine have become common topics of discussion during the past twenty years. Bitter disputes have arisen regarding abortion, suicide, human experimentation, as well as the management of the dying patient and the severely disabled newborn. These issues are loaded with such emotion that it is sometimes difficult to look at them in a rational manner. Noted neurosurgeon and author Milton D. Heifetz has made the tough decisions in tragic, often anguishing situations. As a member of hospital (...) ethics committees for many years, Dr. Heifetz found that discussions of complex issuesmany involving urgent matters of life and deathwere all too often clouded by tradition, dogma, and gut reactions. A comprehensive moral foundation with the flexibility to respond to often rapidly changing circumstances is desperately needed if health-care professionals are to confront head-on the daily questions of medical ethics. Dr. Heifetz offers this moral grounding to help all who must make difficult medical choices: physicians, nurses, patients, families, and policy makers struggling to develop substantive rules for medical conduct. (shrink)

The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) thought of geometry and algebra not as complementary modes of mathematical investigation, but rather as constituting morally opposed approaches: whereas geometry is the sine qua non of inquiry leading from ruthless passion to temperate perception, in accord with the human condition, algebra leads in the reverse direction, to excess and oppression. We explore the constituents of this argument, with their roots in classical Greek thought, and also how Simone Weil came to qualify it following (...) her exchange with her brother, the mathematician André Weil. (shrink)

In Economics individuals are defined by their preferences over the consequences of their own actions and the actions carried out by others. In contrast, Simone Weil depicts the individual as continuously re-constituted by the contact that he establishes with reality via his action. Such an action is aimed at achieving an effect in the physical world, but what makes it human is not success per se, but rather the fact that it stems from reasoning and planning. Affliction is caused by (...) effort carried out mechanically like that of a beast of burden, when the individual has no opportunity to exercise reason for choosing how to confront reality's ever-challenging hazards and necessity. (shrink)

In an attempt to explore further the Madelung fluid-like representation of quantum mechanics, we derive the small perturbation equations of the fluid with respect to its basic states. The latter are obtained from the Madelung transform of the Schrödinger equation eigenstates. The fundamental eigenstates of de Broglie monochromatic matter waves are then shown to be mapped into the simple basic states of a fluid with constant density and velocity, where the latter is the de Broglie group velocity. The normal modes (...) with respect to these basic states are derived and found to also satisfy the de Broglie dispersion relation. Despite being dispersive waves, their propagation mechanism is equivalent to that of sound waves in a classical ideal adiabatic gas. We discuss the physical interpretation of these results. (shrink)

An analysis of medical ethics today discusses abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and human experimentation among other topics.

John Rawls and Simone Weil presented two distinct conceptions of political justice, aimed at articulating a common ethos in an inherently heterogeneous society. The terms of the former, chiefly concerned with the distribution of primary goods, underwrite much of today's Western democracies political liberalism. The terms of the latter, chiefly concerned with the way interaction is organised in social activities in view of the body and soul's balancing pairs of needs, are less well known. We explain the sense in which (...) the overlapping consensus in Weil's notion of political justice is “thicker”, and may thus deserve more attention – alongside that of Rawls – for substantiating a democratic ethos within political liberalism. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years or so, a small but growing literature has emerged with the aim of modeling agents who are unaware of certain things. In this paper we compare two different approaches to modeling unawareness: the object-based approach of Board and Chung (Object-based unawareness: theory and applications. University of Minnesota, Mimeo, 2008) and the subjective-state-space approach of Heifetz et al. (J Econ Theory 130: 78-94,2006). In particular, we show that subjectivestate-space models (henceforth HMS structures) can be embedded (...) within object-based models (henceforth OBU structures), demonstrating that the latter are at least as expressive. As long as certain restrictions are imposed on the form of the OBU structure, the embedding can also go the other way. A generalization of HMS structures (relaxing the partitional properties of knowledge) gives us a full converse. (shrink)

With the idea of analyzing awareness as potential for knowledge, we propose a novel semantics for awareness logic. Expressivities of languages with different combinations of modalities for this semantics are investigated. We explore the properties of our semantics and compare our model with Fagin & Halpern model and the model by Heifetz et al. in partitional settings. A series of equivalence results are established from the comparison. Finally, we provide two axiomatizations for implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge, respectively, and (...) prove soundness and completeness for them. (shrink)

We propose a notion of a sub-model for each agent at each state in the Heifetz et al. model of interactive unawareness. Presuming that each agent is fully cognizant of his sub-model causes no difficulty and fully describes his knowledge and his beliefs about the knowledge and awareness of others. We use sub-models to motivate the HMS conditions on possibility correspondences.

Despite the ubiquity of healthcare simulation and the humanities in medical education, the two domains of learning remain unintegrated. The stories suffused within healthcare simulation have thus remained unshaped by the developments of narrative medicine and the health humanities. Healthcare simulation, in turn, has yet to utilize concepts like co-construction and narrative competence to enrich learners’ understanding of patient experience alongside their clinical competencies. To create a conceptual bridge between these two fields (including narrative-based inquiry more broadly), we redescribe narrative (...) competence via Ronald Heifetz’s distinction of “technical” and “adaptive” challenges outlined in his adaptive leadership model. Heifetz, we argue, enriches learners’ self-understanding of the unique demands of cultivating narrative competence, which can be both elucidated on the page and tested within the charged yet supportive simulation environment. We introduce Co-constructive Patient Simulation (CCPS) to demonstrate how working with simulated patients can support narrative work by drawing on the clinical vicissitudes of learners in the formulation and enactment of case studies. The three movements of CCPS—resensing, retelling, and retooling—told through learner experiences, describe the affinities and divergences between narrative medicine’s sequence of attention, representation, and affiliation; Montello’s three forms of narrative competence (departure, performance, change), and Heifetz’s three steps (observe, interpret, and intervene) of adaptive leadership. (shrink)