In this book, best-selling author and mathematician Haim Shapira presents an introduction to mathematical theories which deal with the most beautiful concept ever invented by humankind: infinity. Written in clear, simple language and aimed at a lay audience, this book also offers some strategies that will allow readers to try their ability at solving truly fascinating mathematical problems. Infinity is a deeply counter-intuitive concept that has inspired many great thinkers. In this book we will meet many sages, both familiar (...) and unfamiliar: Zeno and Pythagoras, Georg Cantor and Bertrand Russell, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether, al-Khwarizmi and Euclid, Sophie Germain and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The world of infinity is inhabited by many paradoxes, and so is this book: Zeno paradoxes, Hilbert's "Infinity Hotel", Achilles and the gods paradox, the paradox of heaven and hell, the Ross-Littlewood paradox involving tennis balls, the Galileo paradox and many more. Aimed at the curious but non-technical reader, this book refrains from using any fearsome mathematical symbols. It uses only the most basic operations of mathematics: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, powers and roots - that is all. But that doesn't mean that a bit of deep thinking won't be necessary and rewarding. Writing with humour and lightness of touch, Haim Shapira banishes the chalky pallor of the schoolroom and offers instead a truly thrilling intellectual journey. Fasten your seatbelt - we are going to Infinity, and beyond! (shrink)

In The Hasidic Moses, Aryeh Wineman invites readers to join him on a journey through various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidic texts that interpret the life of Moses. Such texts read their own accent on spirituality and innerness along with their conceptions of community and spiritual leadership into the biblical account of Moses. Wineman reveals the ways in which historical Hasidic voices interpreted both the Exodus from Egypt and the scene of Revelation at Sinai as statements concerning what occurs constantly (...) in our lives at all times. In addition, Wineman shows how Hasidic readers embraced the idea that Moses had to die in order that his soul might return to the world in the righteous and holy ones of every generation, and that the presence of Moses actually transcends time and is present in spiritual understanding as it unfolds at any moment in any period. ""Aryeh Wineman has written a clear and accessible book that serves as a delightful entry into the world of Hasidic thought. Using the template of Hasidic interpretations of the life of Moses, he takes the reader carefully through a broad range of Hasidic works, highlighting the Hasidic resistance to the plain meaning of scripture, opting instead for their penchant for devotional and spiritually deepening readings... The impulse toward spiritualizing both deepens the original text of the Torah and transcends it, stimulating the reader to read the Torah as an edifying document, rather than primarily a historical, legal, or even national work."" --Joel Hecker, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College ""Aryeh Wineman's The Hasidic Moses is a triumph on every level... The figure of Moses is brought alive in the words of the classic Hasidic masters and is made available for a new generation of spiritual seekers hungry to find meaning in biblical models and mystical texts. The Bible tells us that no one knows where Moses is buried--but we can say that he lives robustly in Aryeh Wineman's sparking new book!"" --Nehemia Polen, Hebrew College, Newton Centre, Massachusetts ""Aryeh Wineman writes authoritatively as the scholar he is, but addresses himself--like the rabbi he also is--not to other scholars, but to readers and seekers who would like to understand. In this way he lives the humility of the teacher Moses and leads us through his writing into the depths of the Hasidic homily and parable... For those of us who don't have direct access to the hasidic texts he translates, his gentle and careful presentation of The Hasidic Moses is a gift from soul to soul."" --Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and Burnt Books Aryeh Wineman has written many studies in the area of Hebrew literature and Jewish mysticism. (shrink)

本书系作者专心致志撰写22年而成的150余万字的《新伦理学》(商务印书馆2008年修订版)之精粹。它几乎将每个理论问题都化为一个鲜活的人生案例,通过解析各个案例而系统展现伦理学博大精深之原理,因而名之 为《伦理学与人生》。.

From Descartes to Spinoza, Western philosophers have attempted to propose an axiomatic systemization of ethics. However, without consensus on the contents and objects of ethics, the system remains incomplete. This four-volume set presents a model that highlights a Chinese philosopher's insights on ethics after a 22 year study. Three essential components of ethics are examined: metaethics, normative ethics, and virtue ethics. This volume is the second part of the discussion on normative ethics. The author analyzes humanity, liberty, justice, happiness, and (...) systems of moral rules. He puts forward 26 value standards that construct a system of measuring state instruction; reveals the relationship between humanity, liberty and justice; puts forward three objective laws of happiness; and discusses the goodness of important moral rules, such as honesty, self-respect and courage. This set is an essential read for students and scholars of ethics and philosophy in general. (shrink)

Proponents of grounding often describe the notion as "metaphysical causation" involving determination and production relations similar to causation. This paper argues that the similarities between grounding and causation are merely superficial. I show that there are several sorts of causation that have no analogue in grounding; that the type of "bringing into existence" that both involve is extremely different; and that the synchronicity of ground and the diachronicity of causation make them too different to be explanatorily intertwined.

Chinese Philosophy provides a clear, accessible conception of the Chinese philosophical sensibility and its evolution throughout history.

Naïve realism is the view that veridical experiences are fundamentally relations of acquaintance to external objects and their features, and multidisjunctivism is the conjunction of naïve realism and the view that hallucinatory experiences don’t share a common fundamental kind. Multidisjunctivism allegedly removes the screening-off worry over naïve realism, and the relevant literature suggests that multidisjunctivism is one of the naïve realist responses to the worry. The present paper argues that the multidisjunctive solution is implicitly changing the subject, so the impression (...) that the multidisjunctivist is addressing the screening-off problem is illusory. (shrink)

Understanding “what something is” has long occupied philosophers, and no Western thinker has had more influence on the nature of being than Aristotle. Focusing on a reinterpretation of the concept of energeia as “activity,” Aryeh Kosman reexamines Aristotle’s ontology and some of our most basic assumptions about the great philosopher’s thought.

We present experimental evidence that supports the thesis :602–625, 2015, Br J Philos Sci 70:77–102, 2019; Bradley in Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017; Goldschmidt and Nissan-Rozen in Synthese 198:7553–7575, 2021) that people might positively or negatively desire risky prospects conditional on only some of the prospects’ outcomes obtaining. We argue that this evidence has important normative implications for the central debate in normative decision theory between two general approaches on how to rationalize several common (...) patterns of preference, which are ruled out as irrational by orthodox decision theory, namely the re-individuation approach and the non-expected utility approach. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

Abstract:This study explores the relationship between beauty and intellect, often represented as diametrical opposites, in Chinese and Jewish texts, particularly with reference to Confucian and rabbinic texts. Four discourses concerning the nexus of beauty and intellect are presented: antagonistic, complementary, authentic, and epistemic. In both traditions, although more so in Confucianism, intellect is sometimes elided with moral virtue, adding another element to the discussion. The comparison of this theme in distant traditions seeks to highlight their shared resistance to a single (...) interpretation or a consistent outlook: while Confucian texts tend to embrace a complementary discourse, along the lines of a physiognomic tradition, competing views can be detected. Likewise, the rabbinic tradition inherits the biblical view that "beauty is vain" but still manifests some cases of a complementary discourse. (shrink)

Theoretical methods for empirical state determination of entangled two-level systems are analyzed in relation to information theory. We show that hidden variable theories would lead to a Shannon index of correlation between the entangled subsystems which is larger than that predicted by quantum mechanics. Canonical representations which have maximal correlations are treated by the use of Schmidt and Hilbert-Schmidt decomposition of the entangled states, including especially the Bohm singlet state and the GHZ entangled states. We show that quantum mechanics does (...) not violate locality, but does violate realism. (shrink)

This article reviews the cultural agenda of the celebrated Dominican preacher Giovanni Dominici in fifteenth-century Florence. Central issues discussed include Dominici’s educational programme, his cultural propaganda, his interest in the visual arts and his opposition to the study of the classics, as expressed in his public popular preaching. The close examination of his cultural agenda discloses Dominici as the most extreme opponent of humanist studies.

Moderating effects of religiousness and spirituality on the relations between sexual and non-sexual dyadic communication with sexual and marital satisfaction were examined. Three hundred forty-two married Jewish women responded to self-report measures. Religiousness moderated the relations between both sexual and non-sexual communication with marital satisfaction—for the less religious these relations were stronger in comparison with the more religious—but not with sexual satisfaction. Sexual communication had a unique contribution to the prediction of sexual satisfaction while both types of communication demonstrated unique (...) contributions to the prediction of marital satisfaction. The implications of these findings on the role of dyadic communication in relational satisfaction and the meaning of sexual and marital satisfaction for the more and less religious are discussed. (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle on the vocation of the philosopher -- Halevi's Kuzari as a platonic dialogue -- Maimonides and the imagination -- Elia del Medigo, Averroes and Averroism -- Paduan Averroism reconsidered -- Philosophy and mysticism -- Maimonides and Spinoza on good and evil -- A note on natural right, nature and reason in Spinoza -- Spinoza and Luzzatto : philosophy and religion -- On the interpretation of Maimonides: the cases of Samuel David Luzzatto and Ahad Haxam -- Harry a. (...) Wolfson as interpreter of medieval thought -- On the limitations of human knowledge. (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle on the vocation of the philosopher -- Halevi's Kuzari as a platonic dialogue -- Maimonides and the imagination -- Elia del Medigo, Averroes and Averroism -- Paduan Averroism reconsidered -- Philosophy and mysticism -- Maimonides and Spinoza on good and evil -- A note on natural right, nature and reason in Spinoza -- Spinoza and Luzzatto : philosophy and religion -- On the interpretation of Maimonides: the cases of Samuel David Luzzatto and Ahad Haxam -- Harry a. (...) Wolfson as interpreter of medieval thought -- On the limitations of human knowledge. (shrink)

_Compelling account of Strauss's mature Maimonidean writings._.

_Compelling account of Strauss's mature Maimonidean writings._.

This article explores the socio-ethical concerns raised by the familial searching of forensic databases in criminal investigations, from the perspective of family and kinship studies. It discusses the broader implications of this expanded understanding for wider debates about identity, privacy and genetic databases.

Consistent with numerous electrophysiological studies, we recently reported that conscious perception is associated with a widely distributed modulation of the P3 component . We also showed that correct objective performance in the absence of subjective awareness is associated with a spatially more restricted modulation of the P3. The relatively late occurrence of the P3 along with lack of control for post-perceptual processes suggests that this component might reflect processes related to stimulus evaluation or confidence rather than to visual awareness or (...) objective performance. The main aim of the current study was to test this hypothesis. While EEG was recorded, participants performed a forced-choice localization task and reported their subjective perception of the target on a 3-level scale that also indexed their confidence. The results showed that our previous findings are replicated when confidence is controlled for. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 21-39, March 2022.

A story of rabbinic poverty relief serves as the fulcrum of this presentation of a rabbinic perspective on wealth and taxes. The rabbinic move, from biblical to Mishnaic law, places the obligation of poverty relief on the city and suggests that the institutions of the polis are the only way to achieve justice on this scale. However, the city must be aware of the individual Other in making policy. In essence the story suggests that when policies ignore the face of (...) an individual stranger, they do not fulfill the demands of justice. This is the rabbinic attempt at threading the needle by walking in the tension between the obsessive asymmetry of the obligation towards the other person and the need for a larger more equitable system of justice which must include others. (shrink)

"מהדורה מוערת ומבוארת של ספר מגלה טמירין על פי דפוס ראשון, כתבי יד מפוזרים, והשוואה לנוסח הספר ביידיש. לספר נלווה כרך מיוחד של נספחים שנוגעים להתהוות הספר ולתכניו, וכלולים בו דיונים עקרוניים שקשורים לכמה סוגיות שעולות בו: מדרש השמות המוצפנים, מקורותיו החסידיים של המחבר, הנוסחים השונים בכתב-יד, והנוסח המיוחד של הספר ביידיש" -- מעטפת אחורית.

This engaging work of comparative philosophy puts the Chinese and American philosophical traditions into a mutually informative and transformative philosophical dialogue on the way to developing a new form of Confucian pragmatism.

Free will, if such there be, involves free choosing: the ability to mentally choose an outcome, where the outcome is 'free' in being, in some substantive sense, up to the agent of the choice. As such, it is clear that the questions of how to understand free will and mental causation are connected, for events of seemingly free choosing are mental events that appear to be efficacious vis-a-vis other mental events as well as physical events. Nonetheless, the free will and (...) mental causation debates have proceeded largely independently of each other. Here we aim to make progress in determining how the free will and mental causation debates bear on one another. We first argue that the problems of free will and of mental causation can be seen as special cases of a more general problem, concerning whether and how mental events of a given type may be efficacious, qua the types of event they are---qualitative, intentional, freely deliberative---given their apparent causal irrelevancy for effects of the type in question; here we generalize what Horgan 1989 identifies as "the problem of mental quausation" (S1). We then build on this result to identify fruitful parallels between hard determinism and eliminative physicalism (S2) and soft determinism and non-reductive physicalism (S3). (shrink)

If, at the outset, we postulate the totality of Jewish thought and lay down the principle of its organic unity and its call to universalism, thus asserting the active solidarity which dominates its relations with Jewish religious and intellectual life in the Maghreb, if we state that both have a privileged interrelationship and use the same modes of expression, then we must add that Maghrebian Judaism is an integral part of the intellectual space, the cultural landscape and the civilization of (...) the Muslim West where it was born, blossomed and bore fruit. (shrink)

The author encountered evocations of suffering and death in all the studies and research he devoted, over 40 or so years, to the intellectual, social and religious life of western Muslim Judaism, and indeed the whole of traditional Jewish thought and its varied modes of expression: rabbinical law, Hebrew poetry, the literature of homily and preaching, mystical writings and the kabbala, dialect and popular literatures in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Some passages are taken from the Zohar (‘The town the angel of (...) death cannot enter’, for instance). The author also refers to the Talmud and magic therapeutics, the power of sacred names, Jewish and Muslim miracle workers, hunting down and casting out demons, etc. Agony, refusal to die, joyous commemoration of death, the cemetery and the cult of the dead, Judeo-Muslim pilgrimages, the wealth of the customs, beliefs and rites of the past lead the author to reflect on the question of death in the present-day world. (shrink)