In this book, Shlomo Biderman examines the views, outlooks, and attitudes of two distinct cultures: the West and classical India.

The linkage between ethical judgment and ethical behavioral intention was investigated. The Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) was used to measure ethical judgment ratings of hypothetical behaviors in retail, sales, and automobile repair scenarios. Confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 300 undergraduate business students showed that a model with three latent variables representing three correlated ethical dimensions of moral equity, relativism, and contractualism, three correlated scenario latent variables, and correlated residuals presented a good fit to the data. Further, structural models (...) of the relationship of ethical judgment to behavioral intentions revealed that behavioral intentions were more highly related to the scenario factors than to the ethical dimensions across three scenarios. Adding a method factor to the model improved goodness-of-fit and changed some structural model conclusions. (shrink)

The traditional hermeneutic ruling not to use reports and legends for questioning edicts and rules signifies the tacit recognition, contrary to explicit statement, of the part of the Rabbinical leadership, of the inevitability of change in diverse aspects if Jewish life. This may invite criticism of the conduct of the ancient leadership, which, as always, is questionable and useless. Rather, an open discussion should be instituted on the proposal to make future changes openly, not surreptitiously; particularly the change from surreptitious (...) changes to open changes is better done openly. (shrink)

Interpretation in Religion is the work of a group of contemporary American, European, and Israeli scholars and philosophers, who analyze the crucial course of interpretation in religion -- religion in general, and, in particular, Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religion, Judaism, christianity, and Islam.

Plato and the Moving Image shows how and why debates in the philosophy of film can be advanced through the study of the role of images in Plato’s dialogues, and vice versa.

At the core of "Scripture and Knowledge lies the problem of the nature of religious knowledge.

A collection of essays in which philosophers of widely different interests grapple with the problem of the relative and the absolute in philosophy and religion.

This paper aims to think or rethink the concept of home as the contemporary avatar of the age-old question of self-identity. In dialogue with Shlomo Biderman, a comparative philosopher without borders who feels at home both in Jewish and Indian sources, the author assembles a philosophical jigsaw-puzzle made of different materials from different thinking traditions in attempt to reveal a new picture of home (and self) compatible with the changing world of immigration, relocation, dislocation and displacement, a world of (...) emigrants, refugees and exiles, in which we live. The puzzle pieces include Plato’s cave, Isaiah Berlin’s “inner citadel”, Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s “Ad Hena”, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Salman Rushdie’s “Imaginary Homelands”, Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, the Bhagavadgītā and Śaṅkara, Paul de Man on translation and Zarina Hashmi’s artwork “Home is a Foreign Place”. The discussion culminates in reflection on translation and the foreignness embedded even in one’s own mother tongue which only the translator (or Rushdie’s “translated man”) can see and feel. If foreignness and alienation are recognized as the common human denominator, and one can sober up from the fantasy of restoring an Edenic past (and language), primordial and complete, then perhaps from within the shards of language, of humanity, a different type of home can be envisioned, based on solidarity and compassion. (shrink)

800x600 Normal 0 21 false false false RO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The dominant approaches to Kabbalah in modern scholarship are basically historical and philological. This is the manner in which the founder of modern scholarship in the field, Gershom Scholem, described his school. Though he also embraced more phenomenological analyses, this approach is less represented in the first stages of Kabbalah scholarship, though it becomes more evident in the last decades. In the writings of Schlomo G. Shoham, an existential (...) approach to Kabbalah - as to humanities in general - has been offered, one in which the experiential dimensions of this lore have been put in sharp relief. In the following pages I shall attempt to underscore some existential interpretations of the concept of Paradise in Jewish mysticism, emphasizing the different spiritual structures that informed the various schools. In a manner reminiscent of Shoham's emphasis on different structures that explain human spiritual life and behaviour, the following remarks will juxtapose the divergences between the ecstatic and theosophical-theurgical schools of Kabbalah. (shrink)

In this book, Shlomo Biderman examines the views, outlooks, and attitudes of two distinct cultures: the West and classical India. He turns to a rich and varied collection of primary sources: the _Rg Veda_, the Upanishads, and texts by the Buddhist philosophers Någårjuna and Vasubandhu, among others. In studying the West, Biderman considers the Bible and its commentaries, the writings of such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, and Derrida, and the literature of Kafka, Melville, and Orwell. Additional (...) sources are Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ and seminal films like Ingmar Bergman's _Persona_. Biderman uses concrete examples from religion and literature to illustrate the formal aspects of the philosophical problems of transcendence, language, selfhood, and the external world and then demonstrates their plausibility in actual situations. Though his method of analysis is comparative, Biderman does not adopt the disinterested stance of an "ideal" spectator. Rather, Biderman approaches ancient Indian thought and culture from a Western philosophical standpoint to uncover cultural presuppositions that can be difficult to expose from within the culture in question. The result is a fascinating landmark in the study of Indian and Western thought. Through his comparative prism, Biderman explores the most basic ideas underlying human culture, and his investigation not only sheds light on India's philosophical traditions but also facilitates a deeper understanding of our own. (shrink)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, assert that rejecting the use nudges is ‘pointless’ because ‘[i]n many cases, some kind of nudge is inevitable’. Schlomo Cohen makes a similar claim. He asserts that in certain situations surgeons cannot avoid nudging patients either toward or away from consenting to surgical interventions. Cohen concludes that in these situations, nudging patients toward consenting to surgical interventions is uncriticizable or morally permissible. I call this argument: (...) The Unavoidability Argument. In this essay, I will respond to Cohen's use of the unavoidability argument in support of using nudges during the process of informed consent. Specifically, I argue that many so-called ‘unavoidable nudges’ are, in fact, avoidable. Although my argument is directed toward Cohen's use of the unavoidability argument, it is applicable to the unavoidability argument more generally. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Introduction 9 -- Postmodernism and the End of 'Humanism'? 19 -- Postmodern Ambiguities: -- Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire 34 -- In Postmodern Disorder: -- The Confused and Confusing World of The Hand that Signed the Paper 40 -- Ethics, the Literary Imagination, and the 'Other': The Hand that Ought, or was Imagined, to have Signed the Paper 47 -- Jew and Anti-Jew in Australian Fiction 58 -- Helen Garner's The First Stone: Ethical Confusions (...) and Contretemps 72 -- Antisemitism and Literature: Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting and Anthony Julius' T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 83 -- Abraham Biderman, Daniel Goldhagen,and Telling It as It Was 96 -- Literary Studies as Ethics or Anarchy? 110 -- An Imbrication of Heteroglossic Discourses? Or Plain Speaking? 118 -- The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring, tra-la: Postcolonialism and Other Messiahs 127 -- Postcolonialism and the Exotic 135 -- Perpetually Moralists: Truth, Ethics and The Empire Writes Back 146 -- Towards a New Ethics 159 -- Conclusion 167 -- Index -- 176. (shrink)