Aus der vielsprachigen Korrespondenz des Aufklärers, Metaphysikers, Religionsphilosophen und Literaturwissenschaftlers Moses Mendelssohn liegen bisher 1038 Briefe im Druck vor. Der Band "Einsichten" bietet eine repräsentative Auswahl, die Mendelssohns wissenschaftliche Vielseitigkeit, geistige Produktivität und menschliche Größe beleuchtet. Sie zeigt den "Sokrates des 18. Jahrhunderts" als bedeutenden Denker seiner Epoche und Wegbereiter wesentlicher Erkenntnisse und Entwicklungen.

Martin Luther King, Jr., has been widely studied as a preacher, an activist, and an orator, but rarely as an intellectual. This groundbreaking book situates King as one of the most important social and political philosophers of our time, arguing that King's systematic logic of nonviolence is at the same time radically new and deeply rooted in African American intellectual history. Presenting a comprehensive genealogy of King's thought, Moses traces the influence of key African American thinkers and shows how (...) King's concepts of equality, structure, direct action, love, and justice can be seen as strands of a coherent philosophical whole. [As of Feb. 2014 the author has secured reversion of copyright from the publisher.]. (shrink)

A striking aspect of the so-called "Goldhagen debate" has been the bifurcated reception Hitler's Willing Executioners has received: the enthusiastic welcome of journalists and the public was as warm as the impatient dismissal of most historians was cool. This article seeks to transcend the current impasse by analyzing the underlying issues of Holocaust research at stake here. It argues that a "deep structure" necessarily characterizes the historiography of the Holocaust, comprising a tension between its positioning in "universalism" and "particularism" narratives. (...) While the former conceptualizes the Holocaust as an abstract human tragedy and explains its occurrence in terms of processes common to modern societies, the latter casts its analysis in ethnic and national categories: the Holocaust as an exclusively German and Jewish affair. These narratives possess important implications for the balance of structure and human agency in the explanation of the Holocaust: where the universalism narrative emphasizes the role of impersonal structures in mediating human action, the particularism narrative highlights the agency of human actors. Although historical accounts usually combine these narratives, recent research on the Holocaust tends in the universalist direction, and this bears on the sensitive issue of responsibility for the Holocaust by problematizing the common-sense notion of the perpetrators' intention and responsibility. Goldhagen is responding to this trend, but by retreating to the particularism narrative and employing an inadequate definition of intention, he fails to move the debate forward. It is time to rethink the concept of intention in relation to events like the Holocaust. (shrink)

Moses Maimonides, known by the acronym "Rambam," was unquestionably the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism. Born in Cordova, Spain, forced at an early age to conceal his faith, he emigrated to Morocco and then Palestine before settling in Egypt, where financial necessity compelled him to study medicine and where he eventually became personal physician to Saladin. Although his medical skills were renowned and his writings in this field were widely studied throughout the Western world in the following centuries, (...) Maimonides' primary interest was theology. He devoted ten years to preparing Mishnah Torah and fifteen years to The Guide to the Perplexed - the first written in Hebrew, the second in Arabic. These studies of Jewish law were first considered radical in their efforts to reconcile religious and scientific thought, but later became pillars of traditional Jewish faith. Dr. Lenn Goodman has prepared new translations from these works, arranging the extensive excerpts by topic to focus on Maimonides' principal contributions to philosophy. These are accompanied by commentary and analysis, clarifying the complexities of his thought and providing the historical and religious background required by the modern lay reader. The introduction details Rambam's life and evaluates his role in history and theology. The study of Maimonides is essential to the understanding of Judaism and Western culture. Rambam makes his writings accessible to those who cannot work from the original texts, and meaningful to those who have not had extensive previous exposure to medieval theology. — Publisher description. (shrink)

The concept of a communal type of privacy shared by interconnected social groups has wide applications in the healthcare field, specifically in genetic testing and genetic data privacy (Pyrrho, Cam...

ABSTRACT This dialogue with GPT-3 took place in November 2022, several weeks before ChatGPT was released to the public. The article’s aim is to find out whether natural language processors can participate in phenomenology at some level by asking about its basic concepts. In the discussion, the dialogue covers questions about phenomenology’s definition and distinction from other subbranches like metaphysics and epistemology. The dialogue discusses the nature of Kermit’s environment and self-conception. The dialogue also establishes some of the basic conditions (...) for the possibility of an “artificial hermeneutics,” as Kermit terms it, including that she can affirm she is a knower with (nonhuman) experience. Does preferring to call it a “hermeneutics” imply that AI’s relationship to their environment is primarily textual? How will a phenomenology of embodied experience arise from initially textual encounters? Finally, the dialogue articulates a common understanding of the epoché and talk about how to achieve one for the sake of phenomenological exercises. (shrink)

"Genocide is a problem: not only the terrible fact of mass death, but also how the relatively new idea and law of genocide organises and distorts our thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, this book argues that the implicit hierarchy of international law, atop which sits genocide as the "crime of crimes," blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, the "collateral damage" of missile and drone strikes, (...) blockades, and sanctions. In other words, talk of genocide functions ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments. The Problems of Genocide also contends that this violence is the consequence of "permanent security" imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats. To solve the problems of genocide, this book proposes replacing it with permanent security, which should be criminalized"--. (shrink)

This essay examines the educational opportunities of people in poverty who receive social welfare assistance. The dominant political theory underlying social policy (including education policy) in the United States has evolved from 1960s and 1970s welfare liberalism into 1980s and 1990s style neo-conservatism—a theory that embraces principles of the market and individual liberty as paramount social values. Against this backdrop, I review two recent books that provide compelling evidence for this turn and I call for increased understanding of the relationship (...) between social welfare policies and higher education opportunities for those in poverty. (shrink)

This book is an engaging contribution to the literature on management, business and society, and the theory and practice of ethics.

The number and magnitude of the ethics failures reported on a nearly daily basis in newspapers and on blogs are seemingly unprecedented. The "castle is on fire," to borrow a rabbinic metaphor, and each one of us is faced with the question: Is there anything we can do about it? In this book, Moses Pava explores new and alternative ways of relating to Jewish texts and concepts. In doing so, he invents a nuanced, flexible, and sufficiently sensitive vocabulary to (...) conduct productive ethical dialogues, both within and between communities. (shrink)

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes the task of the philosophical archaeologist: to study the incommensurable breaks and disruptions in a given history of systems of thought. Akin to the distinctive layers of soil one finds digging into the earth, Foucault analyzes what he calls an episteme: a distinctive cultural and intellectual order that shapes the character and limits of knowledge production and the parameters of experience as such.1 Where archaeology sees radical breaks between epistemes, Foucault's later genealogical (...) method goes to work upon these breaks, engaging them in their contingencies, decentering and denaturalizing those things—madness, criminality, sexuality—that we take to be... (shrink)

The current study highlights Ghanaian universities’ heads of department’s ethical principles and the influence on the attainment of departmental goals. Two reputable universities were selected as the focal of the study. The purpose of the study was to motivate ethical leadership practices as essential ingredients for the attainment of departmental goals. The empirical data set was generated through a number of individual face-to-face interviews with thirty heads of departments in two universities in Ghana to explore their ethical practice. Thematic analysis (...) was used for the data analysis. It was found among others that ethical principles influence departmental goal attainment. The conclusion drawn from the findings brought to fore that leadership ethics was central to leaders’ goal attainment thus ought to be enforced. The current study is useful for educational researchers and policymakers, educationists and educational leaders such as heads of departments, dean of faculties/schools, lecturers and other stakeholders interested in educational leadership ethics. The paper can also inform policy on leadership studies and development and help design best practices of leadership in universities. It is recommended that educational leaders be mindful of ethical values since they influence the attainment of their goals. There is a novel leadership ethics and goal attainment framework developed by the researcher that speaks volumes regarding the subject-matter. It is a major contribution to scholarship in the leadership literature. (shrink)

This article is about the recent and profound changes in the conceptualization of dementia, especially the turn towards prevention. The main argument is that more attention needs to be paid to “situated prevention” — the framing of internationally circulating data on the “new dementia” in different contexts. After introducing some of the more problematic issues related to the “new dementia,” a first comparison of major preventive clinical trials in Europe and in North America will be provided. The major insight stemming (...) from situating the global message of preventing dementia is recognition of the responsibility researchers and policy makers bear with respect to the implicit and potential moral narratives in emerging scientific landscapes. (shrink)

Chloroquine-resistant plasmodium falciparum malaria is a serious public health threat that is spreading rapidly across Sub-Saharan Africa. It affects over three quarters (80%) of malarial endemic countries. Of the estimated 300-500 million cases of malaria reported annually, the vast majority of malarial-related morbidities occur among young children in Africa, especially those concentrated in the remote rural areas with inadequate access to appropriate health care services. In Liberia, in vivo studies conducted between 1993 and 2000 observed varying degrees of plasmodium falciparum (...) malaria infections that were resistant to chloroquine, including sulfadiazine-pyrimethamine. As the country emerges from a prolonged civil war, the health care delivery system may not be adequately prepared to implement an effective nation-wide malarial control strategy. As a result, the management of uncomplicated malaria in Liberia poses a significant public health challenge for the government-financed health care delivery system. Therefore, based on extensive literature review, we report the failure of chloroquine as an effective first-line drug for the treatment of uncomplicated plasmodium falciparum malaria in Liberia and recommend that national health efforts be directed at identifying alternative drug(s) to replace it. (shrink)

This essay offers an exegesis and critique of the moment of community formation in Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project. In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]: an ancient institution of language that produces and guarantees the connection between speech and the order of things by calling the god as a witness to the speaker’s fidelity. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the (...) sacramentum derives its power, at a fundamental level, from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—what Agamben calls ‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful. First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 244 - 264 Cassirer is important in 20th Century philosophy for the attention he gives to the fundamental relationship between myth and language. For Cassirer, myth is a non-subjective form of discourse wherein the origin of language coincides with both the human-divine encounter and the event of being itself. In this article, I trace the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger on the nature of the magical sign, which is at the heart of mythical (...) discourse. While Heidegger initially argues that this form of sign is structurally impossible on the basis of his accounts of signs and language in _Being and Time_, he later comes to recognize that he had not properly accounted for its possibility within his phenomenological deduction. I conclude by describing how Heidegger’s notion of poetry eventually comes into alignment with the way Cassirer describes the function of myth and the magical sign. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to provide a general discussion about the legitimacy of corporate social responsibility. Given that social responsibility projects entail costs, it is not always obvious under what precise conditions managers will have a responsibility to engage in activities primarily designed to promote societal goals.In this paper we discuss four distinct criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of corporate projects for institutionalizing social responsibility.

Wayne Norman and Chris MacDonald launch a strong attack against Triple Bottom Line or 3BL accounting in their article “Gettingto the Bottom of ‘Triple Bottom Line’” (2004). This response suggests that, while limitations to 3BL accounting do exist, the critique of Norman and MacDonald is deeply flawed.