מנושאי הספר: האדם ויוצרו, האדם והחברה, האדם וחייו.

Pt. 1. The individual and his creator. The fear of God in our time -- Natural morality -- In-depth Torah study -- Levels of mitzvot -- The personal element in serving God -- Religious experience -- Naturalness in the worship of God -- The significance of Torah values -- Tension vs. tranquility in the worship of God -- Pt. 2. The individual and society. Fundamentals of prayer -- Derekh eretz, being a mensch -- "I dwell among my people" -- The (...) obligation to sanctify God's name -- Attending to the needs of the community -- The message beyond mere words -- How to relate to one who has lost his faith -- Pt. 3. The individual and his life. Humanity -- Dealing with crisis -- Adhering to values -- Independent decision-making. (shrink)

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years (...) before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism. (shrink)

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years (...) before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism. (shrink)

Dyuḳan inṭeleḳṭuʼali shel manhig ruḥani be-ʻidan mahapkhani. Yehuda leʼon Ashkenazi (Meniṭo) 1922-1996 hogeh, mekhanekh ṿe-ish maʻaśhe.

Background: This article aims to review research manuscripts in the past 5 years that focus on the effects of debt on depression, anxiety, stress, or suicide ideation in Asian countries.Methods: A search for literature based on the PRISMA guidelines was conducted on Medline, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect, resulting in nine manuscripts meeting inclusion criteria. The studies were conducted in Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, and China.Results: The findings of the studies show that there is evidence to (...) support that being in debt is related to Asian participants experiencing depression, anxiety, stress, or suicide ideation. However, the studies are limited to quantitative studies only. The definition of debt is also unclear in most manuscripts. Few manuscripts also examined how other factors influence the relationship between debt and mental illness.Conclusion: There are limited studies on the psychological effects of debt on the Asian population. Future studies should focus on the relationship between debt and psychological well-being among this population. (shrink)

An individual’s accountability to oneself leads to self-regulatory behaviour. A field experiment afforded an opportunity to test this relation, given that external accountability conditions were absent. A single group pre-test/post-test design was used to test the hypothesis. A group of full-time resident management students, n ≈ 550, take four meals during the day in the institute mess. As a part of the experiment, food wastage in the form of leftovers on the plates of subjects was measured. As a pre-test, the (...) measurement occurred at two levels. Subjects could see how much they are adding to the total waste by looking at a weighing scale placed under a waste basket, and they could also see the total waste data for each of the four meals for the day and a day earlier displayed at a prominent place. After 105 days, the weighing scale under the basket was removed, and as a post-test measurement, the total waste data for the four meals were noted down for another 72 days. A manipulation test indicated that the experiment has had the desired effect of invoking self-accountability in subjects during the pre-test phase, and diluting it during the post-test phase. Time series analysis of pre-test and post-test data indicated that the wastage data decreased in the pre-test phase. However, the post-test waste data showed an increase over a period of time. The results indicate that accountability conditions like social norms invoke self-accountability cognition leading to self-regulatory behaviours in individuals. (shrink)

Finding the Raga is more than a book that tries to make sense of the raga, of Indian classical music, and of how Indian music challenges Western notions of what music might be. It is a work of self-inquiry, as might be expected from Amit Chaudhuri, a musician who is also a novelist; a novelist who is also a critic and essayist; a trained and recorded performer in the Indian classical vocal tradition who was also, once, a guitarist and songwriter (...) in the American folk music style and is now a composer and recorded performer in experimental music. Each one of these undertakings and selves signifies turns at different points in life, and each turn and change of direction brings a fresh perspective on music, writing, and what it means to take on and do these things. No category-Indian, Western-is a given in this book. Partly a record of one of the most important turns in the author's life, toward North Indian music, and of its long aftermath, Finding the Raga is also part autobiography set in 1970s Bombay, part essay, and part detailed analysis of how we might grasp the conceptual underpinnings as well as the experience of music. It explores the different ways in which music relates to the world-whether it's through representation or evocation, as in Western music, or through the raga being sung at different times of day and in different seasons, as in Indian music-and also tries to understand what the act of listening involves for individuals and cultures. (shrink)

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more (...) usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading. (shrink)

Illusionists about consciousness boldly argue that phenomenal consciousness does not fundamentally exist — it only seems to exist. For them, the impression of having a private inner life of conscious qualia is nothing more than a cognitive error, a conjuring trick put on by a purely physical brain. Some phenomenal realists have accused illusionism of being a byproduct of modern Western scientism and overzealous naturalism. However, Jay Garfield has endorsed illusionism by explicitly drawing support from the classical Yogācāra Buddhist philosopher (...) Vasubandhu. In this paper, I assess the degree to which Garfield’s illusionist interpretation accurately captures the views of Vasubandhu and his commentator Sthiramati in their extant Sanskrit works. As it turns out, Vasubandhu and Sthiramati converge with contemporary illusionists in taking an unconscious causal basis of cognitive/linguistic processes to be responsible for generating the illusion of representational states with apparently phenomenal contents. Within their constitutive understanding of the mind as the “imagination of what is non-existent” (abhūtaparikalpa), I raise possible candidates for what might seem to be real instances of phenomenality — mental appearances (pratibhāsa), affective sensory experience (vedanā), and “intrinsic luminosity” (prakṛtiprabhāsvara) — and consider possible responses on behalf of an illusionist interpreter. I conclude that Vasubandhu and Sthiramati really do appear to be strong illusionists about phenomenal consciousness, particularly if phenomenal states are assumed to be essentially representational. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1. - Elul, Tishre - Adar -- ḥeleḳ 2. Nisan-Av.

ḥeleḳ 1. - Elul, Tishre - Adar -- ḥeleḳ 2. Nisan-Av.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

This text is the introduction to V. Amit & N. B. Salazar, Pacing Mobilities. Timing, Intensity, Tempo & Duration of Human Movements, New York/Oxford, Berghahn, 2020, 202 p. It is also available on Berghahn publisher website.

Brings together the most recent discoveries in quantum physics and provides a powerful argument for transforming not only the way we view nature, but also how we view our own personal reality. The book also challenges readers to give up their prejudices regarding material realism.

The neurophysiological evidence from the Miyashita group's experiments on monkeys as well as cognitive experience common to us all suggests that local neuronal spike rate distributions might persist in the absence of their eliciting stimulus. In Hebb's cell-assembly theory, learning dynamics stabilize such self-maintaining reverberations. Quasi-quantitive modeling of the experimental data on internal representations in association-cortex modules identifies the reverberations (delay spike activity) as the internal code (representation). This leads to cognitive and neurophysiological predictions, many following directly from the language (...) used to describe the activity in the experimental delay period, others from the details of how the model captures the properties of the internal representations. (shrink)

Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function are necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go “back to (...) Kant” to find the most defensible version of an essentialist content non-conceptualism. I propose instead that non-conceptualists go back even further to the seventh-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, so that they may not only find historical precedent for an essentialist content view, but also some better arguments in its favor. This essay reconstructs Dharmakīrti's essentialist non-conceptualism about the contents of conscious sensory representations and the refined theory of conceptualization that it presupposes. In particular, I examine his arguments from the proprietary phenomenology of sensory experience, the cognitive encapsulation of sensory processing, as well as the iconic format of sensory representations, and assess the strength of these arguments relative to their modern counterparts. (shrink)

Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness into (...) an experiential center and periphery. I develop Watzl’s theory into an account of UIA by suggesting that a subject is acquainted with its own conscious mental states through being reflexively aware of how these states are structured by attention into a unified subjective perspective. I favorably compare this Watzl-inspired account of UIA against other contemporary analytic and classical Buddhist accounts of reflexive awareness and subjective character, which variously ground the inner awareness of conscious states on their intrinsic phenomenal quality of “for-me-ness,” their affective/hedonic valence, or a subject’s disposition to introspect them. The Watzl-inspired account also accommodates possible counter-examples to Watzl’s theory posed by states of minimal phenomenal experience such as lucid dreamless sleep and non-dual meditative awareness. (shrink)

In the collectivist culture of India, family occupies a central place in organizing social and personal lives of the people. However, the forces of industrialization and urbanization are changing the life style and leading to reprioritization of values. Against this backdrop this study examined the pattern of actual and desired family values in the context of ecology, family type and generation. The sample was drawn from urban, semi-urban and rural areas in central India representing parent–child pairs belonging to joint and (...) nuclear families. Using an indigenously developed measure of family values the study revealed that ecological setting and generation significantly influenced the family value of positive interaction. The type of family emerged as a significant factor for three major values, that is, social order, manners and helping. The interaction of ecology, family type and generation were significant for the values of social order and helping. In general, the type of family and ecological setting yielded major influence in shaping values. The implications of the findings for parenting are discussed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the incisive counter-arguments against Gaṅgeśa’s defense of non-conceptual perception offered by the Dvaita Vedānta scholar Vyāsatīrtha in his Destructive Dance of Dialectic. The details of Vyāsatīrtha’s arguments have gone largely unnoticed by subsequent Navya Nyāya thinkers, as well as by contemporary scholars engaged in a debate over the role of non-conceptual perception in Nyāya epistemology. Vyāsatīrtha thoroughly undercuts the inductive evidence supporting Gaṅgeśa’s main inferential proof of non-conceptual perception, and shows that Gaṅgeśa has no basis for thinking (...) that non-conceptual perception has any necessary causal role in generating concept-laden perceptual awareness. He further raises a number of internal inconsistencies and undesirable consequences for Gaṅgeśa’s claim that non-conceptual states are introspectively invisible. His own causal theory of perception is more parsimonious than the Nyāya account, and is equally compatible with direct realism. I conclude by noting several striking parallels between Vyāsatīrtha’s views and the conceptualism of John McDowell, while also suggesting that Vyāsatīrtha's own conceptualism is not unduly constrained by some of McDowell’s limiting assumptions about concepts and perceptual contents. (shrink)

The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that inputs from internal states in obsessive–compulsive individuals are attenuated, which could be one source of the pervasive doubting and checking in OCD. Participants who were high or low in OC tendencies were asked to produce specific levels of muscle tension with and without biofeedback, and their accuracy in producing the required muscle tension levels was assessed. As predicted, high OC participants performed more poorly than low OC participants on this task when (...) biofeedback was not available. When biofeedback was provided, the difference between the groups was eliminated, and withdrawing the monitor again reversed this effect. Finally, when given the opportunity, high OC participants were more likely than low OC participants to request biofeedback. These results suggest that doubt in OCD may be grounded in a real and general deficiency in accessing internal states. (shrink)