Obsessive doubt and commitment phobia are relationship wreckers. Written by an anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) expert, Relationship OCD offers an evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral approach to finding relief from chronic relationship anxiety. Readers will learn to challenge the intrusive thoughts and worries that trigger harmful emotions, embrace the uncertainty inherent in all human connections, and discover a deeper sense of intimacy and trust.

Thinking About Judaism: Philosophical Reflections on Jewish Thought examines the light shed by philosophy upon significant areas of Jewish life and academic studies, including Jewish history, Jewish ethics, Jewish law, and Jewish aesthetics. As the author clearly illustrates, the teachings of leading theorists on the subjects of general history, ethics, law, and aesthetics inspire us to think about corresponding subjects related to Judaica.

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

È un onore per me, e nello stesso tempo un grande piacere, aprire il convegno su Franz Rosenzweig e il futuro del suo «nuovo pensiero». Permettetemi, in qualità di Presidentessa dell’Internationale Rosenzweig-Gesellschaft, di presentare i miei ringraziamenti e la mia gratitudine – e quelli della Società – alle autorità accademiche dell’Università di Chieti-Pescara e agli organizzatori dell’evento. Vorrei anche cogliere l’occasione di questo Convegno per richiamare il ricordo della nostra Presidentessa onoraria, Rivka Horwitz, deceduta di recente, il 4 gennaio 2007, (...) a Gerusalemme. Riwka Horwitz, che partecipava attivamente a tutti i nostri incontri – mi ricordo della sua presenza e dei suoi interventi a Kassel, ma anche a Tempe, in Arizona –, ha ancora potuto partecipare al nostro Convegno di Gerusalemme, ed è con sorpresa, e con molta tristezza, che abbiamo saputo della sua scomparsa. Veniva dalla Germania: nata nel 1929 a Bad Homburg, era emigrata fin dal 1933 in Palestina, ed è in Israele che aveva scelto di vivere ed insegnare – soprattutto all’Università Ben Gurion, a Beer Sheva, dal 1975. Ma dopo la guerra non aveva neppure avuto timore di tornare in Germania e di interessarsi là delle tracce dell’eredità ebraica. Questo fatto manifestava già il carattere intrepido che mi ha sempre colpito in lei: è necessario ad una donna – soprattutto una donna che, come lei, veniva dal mondo ebraico ortodosso e praticante – per pretendere di farsi strada in un Paese ostile, un Paese che dovette apparirle ostile, e che lo era, senza alcun dubbio, per molti versi. (shrink)

In Greg Bear’s critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin’s Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a “noncoding region” of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way (...) and, moreover, that it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear’s literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari’s important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear’s novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis’s theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species’ DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear’s informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin’s Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience. (shrink)

On behalf of the editors of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, I am pleased to introduce the editors and venue of the Symposium on Synthetic Life: Scientific, Historical, and Ethical Perspectives, which occupies much of the current issue of our journal. We are very pleased that Professors Ute Deichmann, Michel Morange, and Anthony S. Travis planned, organized, and edited the proceedings of the workshop on this topic, held on March 5-6, 2012, at the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and (...) Philosophy of the Life Sciences and the NIBN at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel.Professor Deichmann has been the founding director of the Centre since it was created in 2007. Although she trained in .. (shrink)

The Medical School for International Health was created in 1996 by the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in affiliation with Columbia University’s Health Sciences division. It is accredited by the New York State Board of Education. Students complete the first three years of the program on the Ben-Gurion University campus in Be’er-Sheva, Israel, while fourth-year electives are completed mainly in the United States along with a two-month global health elective at one of numerous sites (...) located around the world . The unique four-year, American-style curriculum is designed not only to prepare physicians who will be able to work at both an individual and community level but also at both of these levels anywhere in the world. In this way, it combines elements of medical and public health curricula not limited to an American perspective. (shrink)

PurposeTo present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.Design/methodology/approachAn in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.FindingsAlthough empowerment is not (...) always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.Research limitations/implicationsThe empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly in one Future Center. It should now be more fully tested and validated in other Future Centers.Practical implicationsThis paper provides a framework to help Future Center practitioners and other future oriented working environments stakeholders to explicitly address empowerment issues.Originality/valueThis paper provides a detailed description of the operation of a regionally focused Future Center in the educational sector. The paper presents a novel empowerment ecology framework for use in facilitated user‐centered collaborative working environments, such as Future Centers. (shrink)

Between November 30th and December 2nd, 2015, the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva held its Eighth International Workshop under the title “From Genome to Gene: Causality, Synthesis and Evolution”. Eric Davidson, the founder of the concept of developmental Gene Regulatory Networks, had regularly attended the previous meetings, and his participation in this one was expected, but he suddenly passed away 3 months before. In (...) this paper, we provide an introduction and overview on five papers that were presented at the workshop and examine the importance of genomes and gene regulatory networks in extant biology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology and medicine, as well as a collection of remembrances of Eric Davidson, of his personality as well as of his scientific contributions. Historical perspectives are provided, and the ethical issues raised by the new tools developed to modify the genome are also discussed. (shrink)