We study the representation of attitudes to risk in Jeffrey’s decision-theoretic framework suggested by Stefánsson and Bradley :602–625, 2015; Br J Philos Sci 70:77–102, 2017) and Bradley :231–248, 2016; Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017). We show that on this representation, the value of any prospect may be expressed as a sum of two components, the prospect’s instrumental value and the prospect’s intrinsic value. Both components have an expectational form. We also make a distinction between (...) a prospect’s overall intrinsic value and a prospect’s conditional intrinsic value given each one of its possible outcomes and argue that this distinction has great explanatory power. We explore the relation between these two types of intrinsic values and show that they are determined at the level of preferences. Finally, we explore the relation between the intrinsic values of different prospects and point to a strong restriction on this relation that is implicit in Jeffrey’s axioms. We suggest a natural interpretation to this restriction. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage de Victor Goldschmidt, pour la première fois en édition de poche, est le seul consacré à une notion centrale de la philosophie platonicienne, le paradigme, à la fois exemple, comparaison et modèle.En prenant comme fil conducteur la définition donnée dans le Politique, l’auteur commence par étudier le rôle joué par « ce procédé privilégié » dans la méthode dialectique des derniers Dialogues. S’exercer sur une réalité banale permet de découvrir la structure d’un « grand sujet », plus (...) difficile à définir, comme le sophiste ou l’art politique. Cependant la réussite d’une démarche en saurait en fonder la légitimité. En s’interrogeant sur son fondement, Victor Goldschmidt montre que l’usage d’un paradigme « obéit à un mouvement profond de la pensée platonicienne, il nous mène du visible à l’invisible ». (shrink)

Cet ouvrage de Victor Goldschmidt, pour la première fois en édition de poche, est le seul consacré à une notion centrale de la philosophie platonicienne, le paradigme, à la fois exemple, comparaison et modèle.En prenant comme fil conducteur la définition donnée dans le Politique, l’auteur commence par étudier le rôle joué par « ce procédé privilégié » dans la méthode dialectique des derniers Dialogues. S’exercer sur une réalité banale permet de découvrir la structure d’un « grand sujet », plus (...) difficile à définir, comme le sophiste ou l’art politique. Cependant la réussite d’une démarche en saurait en fonder la légitimité. En s’interrogeant sur son fondement, Victor Goldschmidt montre que l’usage d’un paradigme « obéit à un mouvement profond de la pensée platonicienne, il nous mène du visible à l’invisible ». (shrink)

Idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental. Idealism has been influential historically, but it has been neglected in contemporary metaphysical debate. This volume of 17 essays by leading philosophers rectifies the situation.

This groundbreaking volume investigates the most fundamental question of all: Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is explored from diverse and radical perspectives: religious, naturalistic, platonistic and skeptical. Does science answer the question? Or does theology? Does everything need an explanation? Or can there be brute, inexplicable facts? Could there have been nothing whatsoever? Or is there any being that could not have failed to exist? Is the question meaningful after all? The volume advances cutting-edge debates in (...) metaphysics, philosophy of cosmology and philosophy of religion, and will intrigue and challenge readers interested in any of these subjects. (shrink)

In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, presents a controversial new view of the fall of democracy and the rise of radical nationalism in the twentieth century. Sternhell locates their origins in the eighteenth century with the advent of the Anti-Enlightenment, far earlier than most historians. The thinkers belonging to the Anti-Enlightenment represent a perspective that is antirational and that rejects the principles of natural law and the rights of (...) man. Sternhell asserts that the Anti-Enlightenment was a development separate from the Enlightenment and sees the two traditions as evolving parallel to one another over time. He contends that J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke are among the real founders of the Anti-Enlightenment and shows how that school undermined the very foundations of modern liberalism, finally contributing to the development of fascism that culminated in the European catastrophes of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This book is an annotated translation of Xu Shuwei’s collection of 90 medical case records – Ninety Discussions of Cold Damage Disorders – which was the first such collection in China. The translation reveals patterns of social as well as medical history. This book provides the readers with a distinctive first hand perspective on twelfth-century medical practice, including medical aspects, such as nosology, diagnosis, treatment, and doctrinal reasoning supporting them. It also presents the social aspect of medical practice, detailing the (...) various participants in the medical encounter, their role, the power relations within the encounter, and the location where the encounter occurred. Reading the translation of Xu’s cases allows the readers high-resolution snapshots of medicine and medical practice as reflected from the case records documented by this leading twelfth-century physician. The detailed introduction to the translation contextualizes Xu’s life and medical practice in the broader changes of this transformative era. (shrink)

Richard Goldschmidt was one of the most controversial biologists of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than fade from view, Goldschmidt's work and reputation has persisted in the biological community long after he has. Goldschmidt's longevity is due in large part to how he was represented by Stephen J. Gould. When viewed from the perspective of the biographer, Gould's revival of Goldschmidt as an evolutionary heretic in the 1970s and 1980s represents a selective reinvention of Goldschmidt that (...) provides a contrast to other kinds of biographical commemorations by scientists. (shrink)

This book is devoted to applied ethics. We focus on six popular and controversial topics: abortion, the environment, animals, poverty, punishment, and disability. We cover three chapters per topic, and each chapter is devoted to a famous or influential argument on the topic. After we present an influential argument, we then consider objections to the argument, and replies to the objections. The book is impartial, and set up in order to equip the reader to make up her own mind about (...) the controversial topics covered. (shrink)

Martial Gueroult (1891–1976) and Victor Goldschmidt (1914–1981) are two major figures in French history of philosophy during the second half of the last century. The latter has often been described as one of the former's “disciples”, on the basis of their common opposition to the “geneticist” approach in the study of past philosophers, and their common support for a “structuralist” one, which was an influential paradigm in various fields of French thought at the time of their activity. A detailed (...) study of their methodological principles and their concrete practice shows that their relationship was much more complicated. (shrink)

In light of Jewish tradition and the metaphysics of time, we argue that God can and will change the past. The argument makes for a new answer to the problem of evil and a new theory of atonement.

At the beginning of Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle reminds us that we cannot claim demonstrative knowledge unless we know immediate premisses, the archai of demonstrations. By the end of the chapter he explains why the cognitive state whereby we get to know archai must be Nous. In between, however, Aristotle describes the process of the acquisition of concepts, not immediate premisses. How should we understand this? There is a general agreement that it is Nous by means of which we acquire (...) both premisses and concepts. I argue that this cannot be the case. Since concepts are simples while premisses are composites , the two cannot be objects of the same cognitive state. I further argue that, whereas Nous is responsible for our grasp of concepts, the state Aristotle elsewhere calls non-demonstrable knowledge is the one whereby we get to know the premisses of demonstrations. (shrink)

Aristotle in Physics I,1 says some strange-sounding things about how we come to know wholes and parts, universals and particulars. In explicating these, Simplicius distinguishes an initial rough cognition of a thing as a whole, an intermediate “cognition according to the definition and through the elements,” and a final cognition of how the thing's many elements are united: only this last is πιστήμη. Simplicius refers to the Theaetetus for the point about what is needed for πιστήμη and the ways that (...) cognition according to the definition and through the elements falls short. By unpacking this reference I try to reconstruct Simplicius' reading of “Socrates' Dream,” its place in the Theaetetus ' larger argument, and its harmony with other Platonic and Aristotelian texts. But this reconstruction depends on undoing some catastrophic emendations in Diels's text of Simplicius. Diels's emendations arise from his assumptions about definitions and elements, in Socrates' Dream and elsewhere, and rethinking the Simplicius passage may help us rethink those assumptions. (shrink)

Proving the existence of God is a perennial philosophical ambition. An armchair proof would be the jackpot. Ontological arguments promise as much. This Element studies the most famous ontological arguments from Anselm, Descartes, Plantinga, and others besides. While the verdict is that ontological arguments don't work, they get us entangled in fun philosophical puzzles, from philosophy of religion to philosophy of language, from metaphysics to ethics, and beyond.

This book investigates various aspects of the controversial relations between Spinoza's philosophy and his Jewish background. It examines some important trends of medieval Jewish philosophy on the shaping of Spinoza's thought - particularly the impact of Maimonides. The book elucidates the differences between Spinoza and his predecessors in regard to Bible criticism, and dwells extensively on the concepts of Substance and Pantheism. It also discusses Spinoza's views of Judaism and the Jewish people, the relationship between state and religion, and some (...) problems of his -Hebrew Grammar-.". (shrink)

A model of a spatio-cultural sub-context (enfolded in a wider scope context) is presented in the form of a blue print of a Complex System with a two-stage decision engine at its core. The engine first attaches a meaning to analyzable datum, and then decides whether to keep or change it. It does not alter already stored meanings but is designed to search for data to be converted into additional stored meanings and improve the accuracy of correspondence of their spatial (...) and cultural range of relevance. Meaning is reduced to the choice of a strategy—a future continuum of events; a choice dependent on a unique Evolutionary Path, a past continuum of events specific enough to lead to the current temporarily stable state of a spatio-cultural category. It is a blue print for a program that can emulate decisions to initiate changes in the environment in which a collective of culture partners resides; changes consisting of movements from one location to another or in the layout of its current location. The model is proposed at a low cultural resolution and is applicable, after suitable modifications, to a majority of city/period pairs. However, any such model has to be city/period specific. It is illustrated with a design for analyzing changes in the Israeli city, in particular in Tel Aviv. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas vertritt die These, dass sich das Konsensprinzip des kommunikativen Handelns in den Meinungs- und Willensbildungsprozess der Politik übertragen lasse. In der vorliegenden grundlegenden Kritik zeigt die Autorin, dass diese These nicht haltbar ist. Anders als Habermas annimmt, findet kommunikatives Handeln keinen Eingang in die Prozeduralität der Politik. Das politische Handeln wird vielmehr durch systemische Vorgaben bestimmt. Diese ergeben sich im Wesentlichen aus der Prozeduralität des ökonomischen Systems sowie aus der über Macht bestimmten Prozeduralität des politischen Systems selbst.

A view of evolution is presented in this paper (a two paper series), intended as a methodological infrastructure for modeling spatio-cultural systems (the design outline of such a model is presented in paper II). A motivation for the re-articulation of evolution as information dynamics is the phenomenologically discovered prerequisite of embedding a meaning-attributing apparatus in any and all models of spatio-cultural systems. An evolution is construed as the dynamics of a complex system comprised of memory devices, connected in an ordered (...) fashion (not randomly) by information-exchanges. An information-exchange transpires when the recipient system adopts a strategy (a continuum of events) that eventually changes its structure; namely, after the exchange, it contains and conveys different information. These memory devices—sub-systems—are also similarly constructed complex system. Only a part of the information is retained by a system in its physical-memory storage, which eventually loses this function too, when the ability to retrieve a common enough structure is lost. The entire amount of information is a system’s structure of connections (information exchanges); it is contained (apparently stored) dynamically when a system is observed in a temporarily stable state. This temporary permanence—robustness and resilience—is attained dynamically; namely, enabled by changes taking place in its sub-systems and in each of their sub-systems. Therefore, for modeling such a system a multi-layer/multi-scale approach is preferable. It enables the addition and subtraction of an interim scale and the consideration of such a scale as a micro or a macro (thus initiating a maneuver up or down scale) according to an ad-hoc requirement of the model, which imitates an envisaged sub system (called an ‘Inner World’), to which a certain range of decisions is relegated. This dynamics is driven (in time) by dynamically originated information growth, as defined by Shannon; i.e. by the fact that each of certain state transitions have occurred sometime in the past of the system just so and not otherwise, and by the fact that they have occurred in a certain order. Therefore, each ‘history’ and memory retrieval availability of information is unique, and thus can be used to differentiate meanings. Hence, there cannot be a comprehensive solution to the meaning attribution model-design challenge. However, the observation that at the core of each envisaged complex system, moving in time according to a rounded logic, there is an information manipulating device, operating necessarily according to a Boolean logic, can be copied into the design of a model. This observation enables, therefore, the embedding of a specific, locally fitted, meaning attributing device, which is an information manipulating mechanism (it splices/attaches one segment of information to another—its meaning). However, this is just a framework; the actual solution has still to be found locally—for each subject system. Such a solution is demonstrated for the change in location or layout in the Israeli city in paper II. (shrink)

The sensation-perception distinction did not appear before the seventeenth century, but since then various formulations of it have gained wide acceptance. This is not an historical accident and the article suggests an explanation for its appearance. Section 1 describes a basic assumption underlying the sensation-perception distinction, to wit, the postulation of a pure sensory stage--viz. sensation--devoid of active influence of the agent's cognitive, emotional, and evaluative frameworks. These frameworks are passive in that stage. I call this postulation the passivity assumption. (...) Section 2 suggests three major reasons for the emergence of this assumption in the seventeenth century: the mental-physical gap, the causal theory of perception, and epistemological considerations regarding the status of the sensory given. In the last section a critical discussion is presented. The passivity assumption is found to have serious empirical and theoretical flaws. (shrink)