The current study uses a repeated measures design to compare two-time points across the COVID-19 pandemic. The first was conducted at the end of the “first wave” [T1] and the second was carried out on October 12-14 2020 in Israel. The participants completed the same questionnaire at both time points. The study examined the predictions of hope and morale at T2 by psychological and demographic predictors at T1. Results indicated the following: The three types of resilience significantly and positively predicted (...) hope and morale. Well-being significantly and positively predicted hope and morale. Younger age significantly and positively predicts higher hope, but not morale. A higher level of religiosity significantly and positively predicts higher hope and morale. More right-wing political attitudes significantly and positively predict higher hope, but not moral. More economic difficulties due to the pandemic, significantly and negatively predict hope and morale. We concluded that hope and morale can serve as significant indicators of the population's ability to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, they can serve as a “thermometer” for the general mood of the population and can be used by decision-makers to assess coping ability at varied stages of the pandemic. (shrink)

As newer interdisciplinary fields gain momentum, long-forgotten works are excavated from the literary canon and reevaluated under the lens of ecocriticism. Traditionally, fictional animal characters were seen as merely symbolic, comical, or trivial. Yet times and attitudes have changed, as evidenced by the growing impetus of animal welfare campaigns, posthumanism, and critical animal studies. Few fictional works dealing with laboratory experiments offer a subjective account of the victims’ agonizing experience. This article will examine Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale and Richard (...) Adams’s The Plague Dogs, depicting vivisection from the nonhuman perspective. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to retrace the steps that led Buchanan from marginal cost pricing to clubs. We claim that the idea individuals could form clubs to finance public goods can be traced back to his first works on public finance, at the end of the 1940s, and relates to the financing of highways and the pricing of their construction and of their use. Very early in his career Buchanan adopted Knut Wicksell’s proposal to use a marginal cost (...) pricing rule even for public goods. The many criticisms raised against this rule led him to replace it with club pricing. (shrink)

Language use can be viewed as a form of joint activity that requires the coordination of meaning between individuals. Because the linguistic signal is notoriously ambiguous, interlocutors need to draw upon additional sources of information to resolve ambiguity and achieve shared understanding. One way individuals can achieve coordination is by using inferences about the interlocutor’s intentions and mental states to adapt their behavior. However, such an inferential process can be demanding in terms of both time and cognitive resources. Here, we (...) suggest that interaction provides interlocutors with many cues that can support coordination of meaning, even when they are neither produced intentionally for that purpose nor interpreted as signaling speakers’ intention. In many circumstances, interlocutors can take advantage of these cues to adapt their behavior in ways that promote coordination, bypassing the need to resort to deliberative inferential processes. (shrink)

L’article prend en considération la façon dont différents auteurs rassemblés sous l’étiquette générale de « présocratiques » commençaient leurs discours. Dans le contexte d’une transmission essentiellement orale tel que celui de la culture de la Grèce archaïque, l’incipit prend une importance fondamentale, dans la mesure où il pose les bases de la communication, définit le type de message que l’auteur veut transmettre et indique dans quelle voie il s’engage. Il donne donc des indications non seulement sur le type de texte, (...) mais aussi sur le genre de public auquel ce texte était adressé. S’il s’agit d’un public restreint et choisi, l’incipit est généralement élitiste, obscur, et fait référence à un code auquel il est difficile d’accéder ou, comme dans le cas de l’écrit d’Alcméon, mise sur la difficulté d’une entreprise que les disciples doivent surmonter à l’aide de l’enseignement du maître. Si le texte est destiné à un public plus large d’amateurs cultivés, il mise sur des phrases ronflantes qui suscitent des visions grandioses et des émotions et placent l’orateur dans une position dominante vis-à-vis de l’auditoire. Ici on prend en considération en particulier les incipit de quatre auteurs assez différents les uns des autres, de la fin du vie au dernier tiers du ve siècle av. J.‑C. : Héraclite, Alcméon, Anaxagore et Diogène d’Apollonie. En recourant à l’analyse linguistique et en les confrontant avec d’autres textes de même époque, on cherche à définir la particularité de chaque texte en relation avec le message qu’il véhicule et avec ses destinataires. Les résultats de cette analyse invitent à reconsidérer la méthode à employer pour aborder les fragments des auteurs dits présocratiques et à se libérer du modèle herméneutique « anthologique » d’Aristote qui vise à rechercher un « système » philosophique et néglige le rythme prosodique, l’harmonie de la langue, le caractère persuasif des textes et leur contexte culturel. (shrink)

This article, in its first part, summarizes Noam Chomsky’s ideas about human nature and their ethico-political consequences, language and its origin and the scope and limitations of experimental science. As a result, there will emerge the portrait of a great scientist without prejudices and a true and honest freethinker. Then, on the second part, and based on the author C. S. Lewis, a proposal will be made about the possible existence of an infused rational soul in humans and how it (...) could connect with the linguist’s ideas with respect to the origin of language. It will also serve to supply with some realism Chomsky’s too optimistic view about human nature. (shrink)

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support (...) of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est. Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies. (shrink)

Al-Najjar and Weinstein propose to scrutinize the implications of recent theories of ambiguity in dynamic settings. They conclude that such implications are so unreasonable as to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the theories under consideration. The present paper argues that the seemingly unreasonable implications highlighted by Al-Najjar and Weinstein can be understood as the result of basic trade-offs that arise naturally in the presence of ambiguity. In particular, Al-Najjar and Weinstein are uncomfortable with the possibility that an ambiguity-averse individual (...) may reject freely available information; however, this phenomenon simply reflects a trade-off between the intrinsic value of information, which is positive even in the presence of ambiguity, and the value of commitment. (shrink)

M. Laura Gemelli Marciano ist Titularprofessorin für Klassische Philologie an der Universität Zürich.

M. Laura Gemelli Marciano ist Titularprofessorin für Klassische Philologie an der Universität Zürich.

M. Laura Gemelli Marciano ist Titularprofessorin für Klassische Philologie an der Universität Zürich.

The photo essay that comprises Elephant House bears mournful testimony to the severely restricted lives of the world’s largest terrestrial mammals at the Oregon Zoo, as well as similar “educational” institutions throughout the United States and the world. While purporting to remain neutral regarding the ethics of keeping pachyderms in captivity, ethno-photographer Dick Blau and author-historian Nigel Rothfels’s provocative book could easily arouse angry or disconsolate reactions in many readers. Rather than focusing on the pachyderms themselves, Elephant House takes a (...) more anthropocentric stance, pinpointing the intertwined relationships between these magnificent animals and the humans who strive to keep them as mentally stimulated and healthy as possible, albeit in a hopelessly confined and unnatural environment. (shrink)

Animals are ubiquitous in literature across all ages and cultures, but their actual presence has seldom been taken seriously, and scholarly endeavors often dismiss them. In Writing for Animals: New Perspectives for Writers and Instructors to Educate and Inspire, 13 fiction writers explore techniques used by themselves and other celebrated authors to make nonhuman worlds more comprehensible to readers, thus instilling us with greater sensitivity. This book bears testimony to the mounting awareness that animals have been treated badly for eons (...) both in real life and in literature, and that the written word has the unique capability for finally “giving animals the voices they deserve.”. (shrink)

This essay deals with the question of what really makes human beings exceptional. It is argued that it is a special kind of love that ultimately distinguishes humans from other animals. Although other kinds of considerations, preferably cognitive ones, have most often been invoked to make such a distinction, these might eventually be found to be, at least in part, a matter of degree and not something qualitatively different, as argued here with respect to this type of love. Arguments from (...) both scientific and philosophical sources are brought to bear on the question. (shrink)

En un número monográfico sobre el dolor no está fuera de lugar abordar una forma especial de aflicción que ha sido denominada, en el contexto tradicional dela cultura religiosa cristiana, como un "dolor del alma" a causa de hechos y situaciones de carácter negativo en que la libertad del sujeto se ha visto implicada.

Para comprender el significado del mensaje de Jesús sobre el amor es preciso situarlo en el contexto del mundo religioso judío y, en cierta medida, de la cultura helenística. Ésta aporta gran parte del vocabulario y del universo expresivo simbólico. Sin embargo, para el conocimiento de la enseñanza del Jesús histórico este contexto no adquiere tanta importancia, ano ser el ya incorporado dentro del judaísmo, sobre todo en las comunidades de la diáspora. Por lo que respecta al contexto judío, hay (...) que superar la visión simplista que considera al judaísmo como la "religión del legalismo" en contraposición al cristianismo como la "religión del amor". El judaísmo, entre otros muchos factores que lo integran, también está basado y organizado en torno al amor. En el Antiguo Testamento existen abundantes perspectivas que enfatizan el amor de Dios hacia los seres humanos, un amor vinculado a la alianza (Dt 4, 37; 8, 17; 9, 4-6; 10, 15) y que se manifiesta como: fidelidad (Ex 3, 14; Sal 103, 4.8.13), misericordia (Sal 51, 1; 89, 23. 25. 29; 98, 3; 145, 8), ternura (Os 11, 1. 3-4; Jer 31, 20). (shrink)

Introduction: Falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries among older adults. Studies showed that older adults can reduce the risk of falls after participation in an unexpected perturbation-based balance training, a relatively novel approach that challenged reactive balance control. This study aims to investigate the effect of the practice schedule on reactive balance function and its transfer to proactive balance function. Our primary hypothesis is that improvements in reactive balance control following block PBBT will be not inferior (...) to the improvements following random PBBT.Methods and Analysis: This is a double-blind randomized controlled trial. Fifty community-dwelling older adults will be recruited and randomly allocated to a random PBBT group or a block PBBT group. The random PBBT group will receive eight training sessions over 4 weeks that include unexpected machine-induced perturbations of balance during hands-free treadmill walking. The block PBBT group will be trained by the same perturbation treadmill system, but only one direction will be trained in each training session, and the direction of the external perturbations will be announced. Both PBBT groups will receive a similar perturbation intensity during training, the same training period, and the same concurrent cognitive tasks during training. The generalization and transfer of learning effects will be measured by assessing the reactive and proactive balance control during standing and walking before and after 1 month of PBBT, for example, step and multiple steps and fall thresholds, Berg balance test, and fear of falls. The dependent variable will be rank transformed prior to conducting the analysis of covariance to allow for nonparametric analysis.Discussion: This research will explore which of the balance retraining paradigms is more effective to improve reactive balance and proactive balance control in older adults over 1 month. The research will address key issues concerning balance retraining: older adults’ neuromotor capacities to optimize training responses and their applicability to real-life challenges.Clinical Trial Registration: Helsinki research ethics approval has been received. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) mechanistic account of dialogue assumes that linguistic alignment between interlocutors takes place automatically, without using cognitive resources. However, even the most basic processes of speech perception depend on resource use. The lack of invariant mapping between input patterns and interpretations in dialogue, as in speech perception, may require controlled, rather than automatic, processing.

The present article focuses on the case of the 2012 hunger-strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. We analyze the ethical dilemma involved in the way the Israeli medical community reacted to these hunger-strikes and the question of force feeding within the context of the fundamental dual-loyalty structure inherent in the Israeli Prison Services—system. We argue that the liberal perspective that focuses the discussion on the dilemma between the principle of individual autonomy and the sanctity of life tends to be (...) oblivious to the asymmetrical relation of power that characterizes the prison system and to the socio-political context in which hunger-strikes take place. Emphasizing hunger-strikes as political acts implies that health practitioners’ conducts cannot be analyzed only through the prism of clinical medical ethics. It requires a public health ethics’ approach, an approach that understands health in the context of the complex relationship between society, state, organizations, communities and individuals. The authors are both academics and volunteers in Physicians for Human Rights—Israel thus our analysis is based both on sociological and public health ethics principles and on the continuous work and advocacy for the right to health of prisoners. (shrink)

This paper reviews the social scientific literature on biometric surveillance, with particular attention to its potential harms. It maps the harms caused by biometric surveillance, traces their theoretical origins, and brings these harms together in one integrative framework to elucidate their cumulative power. Demonstrating these harms with examples from the United States, the European Union, and Israel, I propose that biometric surveillance be addressed, evaluated and reframed as a new form of control rather than simply another means of inspection. I (...) conclude by delineating three features of biometric technologies—complexity, objectivity, and agency—that demonstrate their social power and draw attention to the importance of studying biometric surveillance. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to defend the legitimacy of different religious systems by showing that they arise naturally as a consequence of the fact that we are linguistic beings. I will show that we do not need to presume that such belief systems all have something in common, and that even if they did we would most probably be unaware of it. I shall argue, however, that this lack of a common core does not mean that understanding between (...) different belief systems is impossible, and that, in fact, a dialogue between them is possible without one system being reduced to another. I will defend these ideas through the use of some principles expounded in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, especially the world-picture concept. (shrink)

Resumo: Este trabalho busca fazer algumas especulações a respeito de uma das idéias mais controversas presentes na primeira obra de Wittgenstein, a saber, o místico. Tentaremos elucidar este conceito, comparando-o com o misticismo religioso caracterizado por William James em As Variedades da experiência religiosa. Tal comparaçáo se faz necessário, a nosso ver, para que se possa esclarecer algumas peculiaridades do místico tractatiano, desenvolvendo assim, uma percepçáo mais acurada da importância deste conceito dentro do Tractatus. A nosso ver, ele náo é (...) um tema gratuito em tal obra, ao contrário, é decorrência lógica do encontro do sujeito volitivo com os limites da linguagem, apresentados através da análise lógica da proposiçáo. Tentaremos, assim, neste trabalho, elucidar como o místico do Tractatus se assemelha e difere do misticismo religioso. Palavras-chave: James; Místico; Tractatus ; Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider syncretic processes as generators of syncretic beliefs and discuss the question of whether the religious believer, especially the theist believer, would have reasons for trusting in the beliefs that arise from this process. I intend to answer the following specific question: Is the theist, specially the Christian theist, justified in forming and maintaining syncretic beliefs? However, the answer to the specific question is dependent on an answer to a broad question, namely, whether a believer in (...) general is justified in forming and maintaining syncretic beliefs. For this reason, much of this article will focus on the broad question to later answer the specific question. I will argue that both in the case of syncretic beliefs in general and in the case of syncretic-theistic beliefs in particular, defeaters are unsustainable, and a religious believer has good reasons to maintain syncretic beliefs. (shrink)

I propose that, in its form, it is possible to make a religious reading of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus along the lines of how Wittgenstein himself understood religion, and in particular, religious conversion. This idea could appear to be completely senseless. But we cannot forget that Wittgenstein himself said that although he did not consider himself a religious man, he could not help seeing every problem in a religious way. It is precisely this religious way of thinking that I would like to (...) apply to the Tractatus. I begin by elucidating Wittgenstein's ideas of ​​religion, especially his notion of religious conversion. After that, I briefly describe the Tractatus, its objectives, and what happens if we climb the ladder of this work. I then show how the goals of the work and where the ladder of the Tractatus leads us take a religious form. That is, they lead to a conversion to a new way of seeing the world and language. This is similar to a religious conversion that makes us see the world in a completely different way. I conclude by discussing how such a religious perspective helps us to understand the sense of the Tractatus by making an analogy with the Wittgenstein’s ideas in relation to the role of religious doctrine. (shrink)

Bringing Flowers HomeWe try to put a bandage on the wound,offering a vague apology:Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.Towers turn out to have been built on sand.Regimes collapse. No use in asking whywe ripped the bandage off that bleeding wound.An earthquake followed by a hurricane,fires, floods: they've passed some of us by.Us. And who is we? And what is home?Last week an enormous yellow moonhung low in a corner of the sky.Beauty is no bandage for the wound,hole in (...) the future much too big to mendor even to imagine, though we tryto camouflage it, bringing flowers home.You said, when we were talking of the end,that no one teaches us to say goodbye,or how to ease the bandage from the wound.Forgive me, death. I brought these flowers home.Moving the PianoCompact, gleaming, black and white,this sturdy Yamaha uprightstood staunchly in one room for yearsuntil, maneuvered through several doorstoday by two young slender menand up a ramp into their van,it ventured briefly out into the world again.The change of space, the space of change:the walls look naked, empty, strange.Heavy has given way to light.Habitual soliditytoo familiar to seeyields to possibilitytoo unfamiliar to see.Late and early, early, late,end, beginning—all are swirledinto a mist that veils the world.The black and white of status quoblends to a color I don't know,transition that I cannot name,but I salute it all the same.Goodbye, piano, and hello.So where is the piano going?Where will it find another life,music and memories unpackedin an unfolding second act?North Carolina, near a riverwhose stream, like time, is always flowing.My son lives there with his wife.Beloved, nothing is forever.You can't step twice into this life.Nap at Stony PointMy cousin and my friendon their respective recent deathbedsslid from my mind. I noticedthe scarlet splash of a cardinal perched on a cannonon a bluff above the Hudson.I lay down on a picnic table,sun on my face, five turkey vulturescircling overhead, and closed my eyes.And when I opened them I felt as pleasedas if I had completed some needful taskinstead of having forgottenhow my friend in January and my cousin in March,both of them alert and wry and tranquil,had faced what each of them clearly saw approaching—more, had recognized and greeted it,instead of ignoring it by looking through it,the way some people, even iftheir office is two doors down the hall,look right through you, pretending not to see you.Or maybe they don't see youany more than one envisions deathon a sunny April afternoon.The Last Lecture HallTheaters that were never ours,classrooms empty and refill.Nor do the trees belong to us.We cross the stage and disappearor venture in among the treesand lose ourselves there.Feverish categories blur.Genre distinctions: what for?The empty theater becomesa lecture hall. A classroom morphsinto a forest murmuringwith voices. Words pelt down like rainor rise like mist and dissipate.The rustling trees swell to a roar.But they were never still.Theater, classroom, maple, fir:feverish categories blur,presences pressing through the veilof the phenomenal;a leopard padding down the aisle.Tiger-masked students fill the seatsof the amphitheater.The old professor, looking outover the upturned faces, said“You are all allegoricalfigures to me. I will not learnyour names.” Did the students laugh?Tragedy, satire, comedy:genres are deciduous.Modes blur, leaves spin and fall.The leaves of memory seemed to makeA mournful rustling in the dark(Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood”).Lights go on in the theater.Class is over. We stumble out.The GatesWhen I woke up I had walked through a gate.I looked around the room—trickle or torrent, stepping into time—and bent my head to drink at a black stream.I look around a roomthick with the dust of after and before.Am I meant to drink from this black stream?My lips are dry,thick with the crust of after and before,gate of ivory and gate of horn.My lips are dry, I'm thirsty.Heat, cold, fire, snow, sun.Gate of ivory and gate of horn:to cross a threshold ends one story(firelight; snow squeaking; winter sun)and begins another.To cross a threshold ends one story(ever after? or a transformation?)and begins anotherthere is no law compelling us to enter.Ever after or a transformation.Torrent, trickle: we set foot in time,but there's no law compelling us to enterstory once we've latched the gate of dream.FilamentsYour past is thickening. You can seeits filaments, as carefullyyou begin to part the strands(they're all connected) with both hands,and clear a path. Now warilyenter the web—not all the way,but toward some kind of clarity.We have been rightly taught that wecan't finish, but must do, the work.Partway through the leafy murk,crisscrossing dapple of the trees,so tough and so precarious,you find yourself in the dawn air,the circle's center everywhere.Along the PromenadeReading a book about transitioningin the twenty-first-century meaning of the wordblends with plans for my son's upcoming weddingand scraps of conversation overheardat the Japanese-themed street fair today.Somnambulists along the promenadefloat in the warm currents of Broadway,eat talk look linger in the sun and shade.Then to the park: October leaves still green(climate change or merely Indian summer?).Snatched memories, I catch them on the wing:Samos Septembers, pomegranate tree,lemon tree, okra, a chameleon,the little summer of Saint Dimitri,they called it. All this happened; but to me?Streams of conversation flowing by.The sound artist described his work like this(if work is the right word): “Accidentallyuploading seemingly private messages,”which describes, also, dreams and poetry,the drifting crowd, incessant carousel,city and weather, time and holiday,all lived, palped, tasted, tested, overheard.Somnambulists along the promenadehave set up booths, their dreams... Bookending my dawn dream: symmetricalsoaking sponges dripping... DNA?Destiny, temperament, personality:the cards we're dealt and that we have to play,except we now can change them gradually.Transition: he or she or rather they,constructed, deconstructed, rearranged,the tarot spread of genealogy,inheritance as aleatoric play.We walked west to Eleventh Avenue,drawn by rumors of Ad Reinhardt's blue,which buzzed and throbbed. Stand still: my head was spinning.Allusions to water or to sky,dense, deep, alarming, ending or beginning... I sat awhile and watched the crowd glide by,enchanted promenaders all drawn inon the exhibition's last dayby the silence's cerulean humming.And then they climbed the stairs, and so did we,to lighter textures on an upper floorwhere Ruth Asawa's baskets in midairweightlessly demonstrated gravity,twigs, trees, crowns, bubbles dancing in white space.Next week my class will read “On Being Ill.”“Blogs,” I'll tell them, is the word we nowuse, not “essay,” for the moving mind,that saunterer who takes note and leaves behindand doubles back and ponders and regretsamidst the wash of vision, the flowand tidal pull of what we see and know,what we've dreamed, what we have said and heard,the thrumming colors and the floating crowd,as if the bubbly brew of sunny dayand anxious dreams could somehow all be caughtup in one enormous, one all-encompassing word. (shrink)

A pergunta central do presente trabalho é: a tolerância é um valor suficiente nas relações inter-religiosas em uma sociedade onde há diversidade religiosa? Para responder isso, começo mostrando alguns usos cotidianos de tal conceito, a fim de elucidar alguns erros comuns a tais usos. Após isso, apresento algumas defesas filosóficas desse conceito e defendo uma ideia de tolerância que entendo ser mais razoável. Em seguida, mostro como tal conceito é necessário e importante para as relações inter-religiosas, apesar de ser insuficiente (...) para tais relações, podendo, na verdade, limitar relações mais profícuas entre religiões, principalmente, em relação a debates de interesse público. Ao final, apresento, brevemente, uma proposta de relação inter-religiosa que vai além da tolerância e promove, a meu ver, uma interação mais profícua entre diferentes religiões. (shrink)