ḥeleḳ 1. Liḳuṭ ʻinyanim niflaʼim ʻal godel ḳedushat ha-Shabat -- ḥeleḳ 2. Liḳuṭ ʻinyanim niflaʼim ʻal tefilot u-seʻudot Shabat.

This article analyses the biochemical object of tnf inhibitors from the perspective of living with an autoimmune disease. The author tries to tease out how the concept of immune inhibition is used in tandem with the biochemical object of tnf inhibitors to dominate in defining and narrating what health and disease, normal and pathological, cure and healing can mean in the context of autoimmune bodies. Specifically, and within the ‘pathological’ framework of autoimmune diseases, the pharmacological treatment of tnf inhibition is (...) designed to suppress the ‘overly’ active immune system, thus acting as a negative or suppressing biochemical agent aimed at putting the ‘malfunctioning’ immune system back in balance. As can be seen in the current conjuncture, tnf inhibitors officially —and governmentally— place those taking them in a risk group, as they 'lower' their overall bodily immunity and make them more vulnerable to infectious diseases, while stabilizing their patho-logical, ‘over’-immune uninhibited condition. Part personal narrative of being diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, part speculative autoimmune theory inspired by such a diagnosis, the article ultimately calls for a different form of embodiment that is neither negative nor affirmative, and yet is resistant even to itself. (shrink)

We study the consistency and consistency strength of various configurations concerning the cardinal characteristics $\mathfrak {s}_\theta, \mathfrak {p}_\theta, \mathfrak {t}_\theta, \mathfrak {g}_\theta, \mathfrak {r}_\theta $ at uncountable regular cardinals $\theta $. Motivated by a theorem of Raghavan–Shelah who proved that $\mathfrak {s}_\theta \leq \mathfrak {b}_\theta $, we explore in the first part of the paper the consistency of inequalities comparing $\mathfrak {s}_\theta $ with $\mathfrak {p}_\theta $ and $\mathfrak {g}_\theta $. In the second part of the paper we study variations (...) of the extender-based Radin forcing to establish several consistency results concerning $\mathfrak {r}_\theta,\mathfrak {s}_\theta $ from hyper-measurability assumptions, results which were previously known to be consistent only from supercompactness assumptions. In doing so, we answer questions from [1], [15] and [7], and improve the large cardinal strength assumptions for results from [10] and [3]. (shrink)

Time stands at the heart of human experience. In this book, new investigations illuminate the gamut of human engagement with time in antiquity.

[4] Be-ʻinyene ḥodesh Elul ṿe-yeraḥ ha-etanim --.

Introduction Outbreaks of serious communicable infectious diseases remain a major global medical problem and force healthcare workers to make hard choices with limited information, resources and time. While information regarding physicians’ opinions about such dilemmas is available, research discussing students’ opinions is more limited. Methods Medical students were surveyed about their willingness to perform medical procedures on patients with communicable diseases as students and as physicians. Students were asked about their opinions regarding the duty to treat in such cases. Results (...) 74% of respondents felt that by deciding to enter medical school they were morally obliged to treat any patient despite the risks. Students’ willingness to treat as physicians is significantly higher than their willingness to treat as students. HIV was significantly the most tolerated disease with respect to performing mouth to mouth resuscitation. Among preclinical students, we found that willingness to treat during the later years is significantly greater than during the earlier years. Among clinical students, the opposite was observed. Discussion Students’ greater willingness to treat as physicians is mostly attributed to perceptions of higher obligations as a qualified doctor. There is greater but not total willingness to perform resuscitation on patients with HIV relative to other diseases. The increased willingness of preclinical students and the decreased willingness of clinical students both emphasise the importance of patient–physician communication and ethics studies during medical school. (shrink)

Reality imitation and imagination - critical studies.

Introduction Outbreaks of serious communicable infectious diseases remain a major global medical problem and force healthcare workers to make hard choices with limited information, resources and time. While information regarding physicians’ opinions about such dilemmas is available, research discussing students’ opinions is more limited. Methods Medical students were surveyed about their willingness to perform medical procedures on patients with communicable diseases as students and as physicians. Students were asked about their opinions regarding the duty to treat in such cases. Results (...) 74% of respondents felt that by deciding to enter medical school they were morally obliged to treat any patient despite the risks. Students’ willingness to treat as physicians is significantly higher than their willingness to treat as students. HIV was significantly the most tolerated disease with respect to performing mouth to mouth resuscitation. Among preclinical students, we found that willingness to treat during the later years is significantly greater than during the earlier years. Among clinical students, the opposite was observed. Discussion Students’ greater willingness to treat as physicians is mostly attributed to perceptions of higher obligations as a qualified doctor. There is greater but not total willingness to perform resuscitation on patients with HIV relative to other diseases. The increased willingness of preclinical students and the decreased willingness of clinical students both emphasise the importance of patient--physician communication and ethics studies during medical school. (shrink)

מאבק הפרדיגמות מציג פרשנות עקיבה להגות היהודית בימי הביניים על פי תפיסת המדע. הוא משתמש במושג "פרדיגמה" כדי לעקוב אחר ההתפתחות הרעיונית של ההגות היהודית בת הזמן. החיבור פורש לפני הקורא שלוש פרדיגמות: הכלאם, האריסטוטליות (עם או בלי לבושה הנאו-אפלטוני) והניסיוניות (הכוללת תופעות שלא היה להן הסבר בפרדיגמה הקודמת, כמו אסטרולוגיה, מאגיה ואלכימיה). הטענה המרכזית בספר היא שעד לשלהי המאה השתים-עשרה התעמתו שתי הפרדיגמות הראשונות, כלאם ואריסטוטליות, ולאחריה - שתי האחרונות, האריסטוטליות והניסיוניות. החיבור מאיר באור חדש את הגותם של רב (...) סעדיה גאון, ר' יהודה הלוי, רמב"ם ואחרים. (shrink)

La primera parte de este libro expone la idea o teoría de las Leyes Noájicas, desde perspectivas espirituales, filosóficas, psicológicas, sociales y políticas. Varios de sus contenidos ya han sido presentados a líderes, incluidos estadistas internacionales (cuyas cartas se incluyen aquí), que han respondido con ánimo a su estudio y difusión. La segunda parte del libro presenta la conducta o práctica concreta de las Leyes Noájicas. Esta tarea precisa procede de una extensa investigación acerca de la Tradición del comentario sobre (...) la Revelación en el Sinaí, de la cual forman parte las Leyes de Noé (que ya anteriormente eran el pacto moral de la humanidad, pero que fueron reexpresadas con autoridad en el Sinaí). La forma en que las Leyes de Noé con sus detalles estructuran la conducta ética de los principales dominios de la existencia humana se establece claramente para el lector general; y con extensas notas a pie de página y referencias para aquellos que buscan profundizar el estudio. (shrink)

Central to contemporary cognitive science is the notion that mental processes involve computations defined over internal representations. This view stands in sharp contrast to the to visual perception and cognition, whose most prominent proponent has been J.J. Gibson. In the direct theory, perception does not involve computations of any sort; it is the result of the direct pickup of available information. The publication of Gibson's recent book (Gibson 1979) offers an opportunity to examine his approach, and, more generally, to contrast (...) the theory of direct perception with the computational/representational view. In the first part of the present article (Sections 2direct perceptioncase study”: the problem of perceiving the three-dimensional shape of moving objects is examined. This problem, which has been extensively studied within the immediate perception framework, serves to illustrate some of the inherent shortcomings of that approach. Finally, in Section 5, an attempt is made to place the theory of direct perception in perspective by embedding it in a more comprehensive framework. (shrink)

The strangeness of modern physics has sparked several popular books--such as The Tao of Physics--that explore its affinity with Eastern mysticism. But the founders of quantum mechanics were educated in the classical traditions of Western civilization and Western philosophy. In Nature Loves to Hide, physicist Shimon Malin takes readers on a fascinating tour of quantum theory--one that turns to Western philosophical thought to clarify this strange yet inescapable explanation of reality. Malin translates quantum mechanics into plain English, explaining its (...) origins and workings against the backdrop of the famous debate between Niels Bohr and the skeptical Albert Einstein. Then he moves on to build a philosophical framework that can account for the quantum nature of reality. He shows, for instance, how Platonic and Neoplatonic thought resonates with quantum theory. He draws out the linkage between the concepts of Neoplatonism and the more recent process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The universe, Whitehead wrote, is an organic whole, composed not of lifeless objects, but "elementary experiences." Beginning with Whitehead's insight, Malin shows how this concept of "throbs of experience" expresses quantum reality, with its subatomic uncertainties, its constituents that are waves and also particles, its emphasis on acts of measurement. Once any educated person could explain the universe as a vast Newtonian web of cause and effect, but since quantum theory, reality again appears to be richer and more mysterious than we had thought. Writing with broad humanistic insight and deep knowledge of science, and using delightful conversations with fictional astronauts Peter and Julie to explain more difficult concepts, Shimon Malin offers a profound new understanding of the nature of reality--one that shows a deep continuity with aspects of our Western philosophical tradition going back 2500 years, and that feels more deeply satisfying, and truer, than the clockwork universe of Newton. (shrink)

The editors welcome letters from readers, although we cannot guarantee that all will be published. To ensure timeliness, correspondents must respond to an article within seven weeks, and not exceed two double‐spaced pages. Letters become the property of the editors and may be edited and shortened at our discretion.

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 253-272.

Agenda Relevance is the first volume in the authors' omnibus investigation of the logic of practical reasoning, under the collective title, A Practical Logic of Cognitive Systems. In this highly original approach, practical reasoning is identified as reasoning performed with comparatively few cognitive assets, including resources such as information, time and computational capacity. Unlike what is proposed in optimization models of human cognition, a practical reasoner lacks perfect information, boundless time and unconstrained access to computational complexity. The practical reasoner is (...) therefore obliged to be a cognitive economizer and to achieve his cognitive ends with considerable efficiency. Accordingly, the practical reasoner avails himself of various scarce-resource compensation strategies. He also possesses neurocognitive traits that abet him in his reasoning tasks. Prominent among these is the practical agent's striking (though not perfect) adeptness at evading irrelevant information and staying on task. On the approach taken here, irrelevancies are impediments to the attainment of cognitive ends. Thus, in its most basic sense, relevant information is cognitively helpful information. Information can then be said to be relevant for a practical reasoner to the extent that it advances or closes some cognitive agenda of his. The book explores this idea with a conceptual detail and nuance not seen the standard semantic, probabilistic and pragmatic approaches to relevance; but wherever possible, the authors seek to integrate alternative conceptions rather than reject them outright. A further attraction of the agenda-relevance approach is the extent to which its principal conceptual findings lend themselves to technically sophisticated re-expression in formal models that marshal the resources of time and action logics and label led deductive systems. Agenda Relevance is necessary reading for researchers in logic, belief dynamics, computer science, AI, psychology and neuroscience, linguistics, argumentation theory, and legal reasoning and forensic science, and will repay study by graduate students and senior undergraduates in these same fields. Key features: relevance action and agendas practical reasoning belief dynamics non-classical logics labelled deductive systems. (shrink)

Photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann use antique cameras, modern lens technology, artificial light, and contemporary pop culture to create portraits of the people in their native state amidst backyards, living rooms, parking lots, and the landscape of Wisconsin. These recent photographs are juxtaposed with portraits from the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent collections, including daguerreotype portraits, ambrotypes, and tintypes of anonymous people taken by nineteenth-century photographers, as well with photographs by such well-known artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Sally Mann, Larry (...) Clark, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Eugene von Beuenchenhein, and Francis Ford. The pairings of new and old illustrate the legacy of portraiture and the significance of “posing” before the lens, and each image is enriched by its proximity to another, unmasking sitter, photographer, and viewer. Unmasked & Anonymous: Shimon & Lindemann Consider Portraiture includes more than sixty color and black-and-white photographs plus essays by Shimon, Lindemann, and Milwaukee Art Museum curator Lisa Hostetler. (shrink)

If we arrange in chronological order the various statements Darwin made about God, creation, design, plan, law, and so forth, that I have discussed, there emerges a picture of a consistent development in Darwin's religious views from the orthodoxy of his youth to the agnosticism of his later years. Numerous sources attest that at the beginning of the Beagle voyage Darwin was more or less orthodox in religion and science alike.78 After he became a transmutationist early in 1837, he concluded (...) that the doctrine of secondary causes must be extented even to the history of life and that after the first forms of life were created, there was no further need for divine intervention, except where man was concerned. Man's body, he thought, was produced by the process of transmutation, but he believed for a time that man's soul was “superadded.” By mid-1838 he had become convinced that nothing, after the creation of life, was due to miracles. God works only through laws, which are capable of producing “every effect of evey kind which surrounds us.” The existence of man, the idea of God in man's mind, and the harmony of the whole system were in his eyes prearranged goals of deterministic laws imposed by God. Such a conception excludes the miracles on which Christianity depends; but it is not possible to say whether Darwin's loss of Christian faith, which occurred at about this same time, preceded and made possible his “materialism” or was rather caused or hastened by it.79 In the weeks after his reading of Malthus, Darwin's belief in a plan of creation gave way to the belief that God created matter and life and designed their laws, leaving the details, however, to the workings of chance. This remained his view until the 1860s.There is no exact parallel between this development of Darwin's religious views and the development of his ideas on evolution, but there is a general correspondence. When he believed in a plan of creation, Darwin's theory of transmutation did not depend on struggle or the selection of chance variations. Adaptation was, for him, an automatic response to environmental chance. From late 1838 to 1859 he believed in designed laws and chance, and this belief, too, has its parallel in his theory. The element of chance in natural selection meant that there could be no detailed plan,in which even man's idea of God would be a necessary outcome of nature's laws (man himself is not a necessary outcome of the working of natural selection).80 But Darwin still believed nature was programmed to achieve certain general ends. We might say that he believed in a general, though not a special, teleology. Natural selection was for him a law to maximize utility, creating useful organs, retaining vestiges for future use. For many years it was a law designed to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environments. Only later did Darwin come to doubt even this sort of design in nature.81 One way of describing the development of Darwin's evolutionary thought is to say that it shows a gradual abandoning of his “theistic” assumptions, so that by the late 1860s his theory was informed to a slighter extent by notions of purpose and design than it was in 1838 or 1844 or 1859. (shrink)

Well-Being and Death addresses philosophical questions about death and the good life: what makes a life go well? Is death bad for the one who dies? How is this possible if we go out of existence when we die? Is it worse to die as an infant or as a young adult? Is it bad for animals and fetuses to die? Can the dead be harmed? Is there any way to make death less bad for us? Ben Bradley defends the (...) following views: pleasure, rather than achievement or the satisfaction of desire, is what makes life go well; death is generally bad for its victim, in virtue of depriving the victim of more of a good life; death is bad for its victim at times after death, in particular at all those times at which the victim would have been living well; death is worse the earlier it occurs, and hence it is worse to die as an infant than as an adult; death is usually bad for animals and fetuses, in just the same way it is bad for adult humans; things that happen after someone has died cannot harm that person; the only sensible way to make death less bad is to live so long that no more good life is possible. (shrink)