Faith: Jewish Perspectives explores important questions in both modern and premodern Jewish philosophy regarding the idea of faith. Is believing a voluntary action, or do believers find themselves within the experience of faith against their will? Can faith be understood through other means (psychological, epistemic, and so forth), or is it only comprehensible from the inside, that is, from within the religious world? Is a subjective experience of faith fundamentally communicative, meaning that it includes intelligible and transmittable universal elements, or (...) is it a private experience that we can point to or talk about through indirect means (poetic, lyrical, and so forth), but never fully decipher? This book presents various manifestations of the concept of faith in Judaism as a tradition engaged in a dialogue with the outside world. It will function as an opening and an invitation to an ongoing conversation with faith. (shrink)

ha-Historyah shel ha-filosofyah ha-Yehudit ke-hermanoiṭiḳah -- Hagut bi-Yeme ha-Benayim -- he-Hagut ha-ishit : rishoniyut ha-ḳiyum ha-Yehudi u-sheʼelat ha-zehut -- ʻAl ha-emunah -- ha-Tefilah -- Meḥuyavut Yehudit pluralisṭit -- Tsiyonut ṿe-Yahadut -- ha-Shivah el ha-Yehudiyut ke-masaʻ eḳzisṭentsyali -- Li-heyot Yehudi be-Yiśraʼel.

Are toleration and pluralism possible in Jewish religion? -- Yeshayahu Leibovitz : the man against his thought -- Leibowitz and Camus : between faith and the absurd -- Jewish religion without theology -- The critique of theodicy : from metaphysics to praxis -- The Holocaust : a theological or a religious-existentialist problem? -- Tikkun Olam : between utopian idea and socio-historical process.

This book outlines the broad spectrum of answers to important questions presented in Jewish literature, covering theological issues bearing on the meaning of the Torah and of revelation, as well as hermeneutical questions regarding understanding of the halakhic text.

ישעיהו ליבוביץ, מגדולי האישים שקמו לעם ישראל בדורות האחרונים, השפיע על ההגות היהודית ועל החברה הישראלית בדרכים שונות. דבריו עוררו תמיד דיון ותגובה. הספר כולל מאמרים המתארים והמנתחים את הגותו היהודית והכללית, השקפותיו בתחומי הפילוסופיה ובשאלות תרבות וחברה, לאומיות וציוניות.

We show that there is a restriction, or modification of the finite-variable fragments of First Order Logic in which a weak form of Craig's Interpolation Theorem holds but a strong form of this theorem does not hold. Translating these results into Algebraic Logic we obtain a finitely axiomatizable subvariety of finite dimensional Representable Cylindric Algebras that has the Strong Amalgamation Property but does not have the Superamalgamation Property. This settles a conjecture of Pigozzi [12].

A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the (...) Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

Why should we decolonise knowledge? One popular rationale is that colonialism has set up a single perspective as epistemically authoritative over many equally legitimate ones, and this is a form of...

Abraham Fraunce’s The Shepherds’ Logic (c. 1585) is one of the first English adaptations of Petrus Ramus’s Dialecticae libri duo (1556). Preserved in a manuscript also containing two shorter essays on Ramist dialectic, the work was later modified and enlarged for publication as The Lawyers’ Logic (1588). But Fraunce’s substantial and almost exclusive use of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherds’ Calendar (1579) as the source for practical examples makes the manuscript treatise a unique document revealing the influence of the Ramist (...) reform of the arts of discourse on the new literary elite led by Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey. This is the first published critical edition of Fraunce’s early treatise and the two companion essays. It presents the texts in modernized spelling, traces their sources and contexts, and draws out their literary and philosophical implications. It also includes relevant excerpts from The Lawyers’ Logic, such as Fraunce’s quantitative-verse translation of Virgil’s Second Eclogue and its Ramist analysis, and a full catalogue of the quotations from Spenser’s Calendar. As a whole, this edition sees Fraunce’s pastoral logic as a first-hand testimony showing how scholarly training in the Renaissance arts of discourse enlightened the composition and interpretation of poetic texts. (shrink)

An exploration of the theories, histories, practices, and contradictions of liberalism today. What does it mean to be a liberal in neoliberal times? This collection of short essays attempts to show how liberals and the wider concept of liberalism remain relevant in what many perceive to be a highly illiberal age. Liberalism in the broader sense revolves around tolerance, progress, humanitarianism, objectivity, reason, democracy, and human rights. Liberalism's emphasis on individual rights opened a theoretical pathway to neoliberalism, through private property, (...) a classically minimal liberal state, and the efficiency of “free markets.” In practice, neoliberalism is associated less with the economic deregulation championed by its advocates than the re-regulation of the economy to protect financial capital. Liberalism in Neoliberal Times engages with the theories, histories, practices, and contradictions of liberalism, viewing it in relation to four central areas of public life: human rights, ethnicity and gender, education, and the media. The contributors explore the transformations in as well as the transformative aspects of liberalism and highlight both its liberating and limiting capacities. The book contends that liberalism—in all its forms—continues to underpin specific institutions such as the university, the free press, the courts, and, of course, parliamentary democracy. Liberal ideas are regularly mobilized in areas such as counterterrorism, minority rights, privacy, and the pursuit of knowledge. This book contends that while we may not agree on much, we can certainly agree that an understanding of liberalism and its emancipatory capacity is simply too important to be left to the liberals Contributors Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel, Patrick Ainley, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Michael Bailey, Haim Bresheeth, Başak Çalı, David Chandler, William Davies, Costas Douzinas, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Roberto Gargarella, Priyamvada Gopal, Jonathan Hardy, John Holmwood, Ratna Kapur, Gholam Khiabany, Ray Kiely, Monika Krause, Deepa Kumar, Arun Kundnani, Colin Leys, Howard Littler, Kathleen Lynch, Robert W. McChesney, Nivedita Menon, Toby Miller, Kate Nash, Joan Pedro-Carañana, Julian Petley, Anne Phillips, Jonathan Rosenhead, Annabelle Sreberny, John Steel, Michael Wayne, Milly Williamson. (shrink)

Among others we will prove that the equational theory of ω dimensional representable polyadic equality algebras (RPEA ω 's) is not schema axiomatizable. This result is in interesting contrast with the Daigneault-Monk representation theorem, which states that the class of representable polyadic algebras is finite schema-axiomatizable (and hence the equational theory of this class is finite schema-axiomatizable, as well). We will also show that the complexity of the equational theory of RPEA ω is also extremely high in the recursion theoretic (...) sense. Finally, comparing the present negative results with the positive results of Ildiko Sain and Viktor Gyuris [12], the following methodological conclusions will be drawn: The negative properties of polyadic (equality) algebras can be removed by switching from what we call the "polyadic algebraic paradigm" to the "cylindric algebraic paradigm". (shrink)

Here we investigate the classes RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ of representable directed cylindric algebras of dimension α introduced by Nemeti[12]. RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ can be seen in two different ways: first, as an algebraic counterpart of higher order logics and second, as a cylindric algebraic analogue of Quasi-Projective Relation Algebras. We will give a new, "purely cylindric algebraic" proof for the following theorems of Nemeti: (i) RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ is a finitely axiomatizable variety whenever α ≥ 3 is finite and (ii) one can obtain (...) a strong representation theorem for RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ if one chooses an appropriate (non-well-founded) set theory as foundation of mathematics. These results provide a purely cylindric algebraic solution for the Finitization Problem (in the sense of [11]) in some non-well-founded set theories. (shrink)

Let be a countable first order structure and endow the universe of with the discrete topology. Then the automorphism group of becomes a topological group. A tuple of automorphisms is defined to be weakly generic iff its diagonal conjugacy class (in the algebraic sense) is dense (in the topological sense) and the ‐orbit of each is finite. Existence of tuples of weakly generic automorphisms are interesting from the point of view of model theory as well as from the point of (...) view of finite combinatorics.The main results of the present work are as follows. In Theorem 2.6 we characterize the existence of tuples of weakly generic automorphisms with the aid of the profinite topology of free groups. In Corollary 2.12 we will show that if has finite topological rank r (and satisfies a further, mild technical condition) then the existence of a weakly generic tuple in implies the existence of weakly generic tuples in for all natural number. Finally, in Theorem 3.2 we show that if is a countable model of an ℵ0‐categorical, simple theory in which all types over the empty set are stationary and has a pair of weakly generic automorphisms then it has tuples of weakly generic automorphisms of arbitrary finite length.At the technical level we will combine elementary investigations about the profinite topology of free groups with the results of [11] about topological ranks of the automorphism groups of some structures. (shrink)

We will study the class RSA of -dimensional representable substitution algebras. RSA is a sub-reduct of the class of representable cylindric: algebras, and it was an open problem in Andréka [1] that whether RSA can be finitely axiomatized. We will show, that the answer is positive. More concretely, we will prove, that RSA is a finitely axiomatizable quasi-variety. The generated variety is also described. We note that RSA is the algebraic counterpart of a certain proportional multimodal logic and it is (...) related to a natural fragment of first order logic, as well. (shrink)

Foundations of Set Theory discusses the reconstruction undergone by set theory in the hands of Brouwer, Russell, and Zermelo. Only in the axiomatic foundations, however, have there been such extensive, almost revolutionary, developments. This book tries to avoid a detailed discussion of those topics which would have required heavy technical machinery, while describing the major results obtained in their treatment if these results could be stated in relatively non-technical terms. This book comprises five chapters and begins with a discussion of (...) the antinomies that led to the reconstruction of set theory as it was known before. It then moves to the axiomatic foundations of set theory, including a discussion of the basic notions of equality and extensionality and axioms of comprehension and infinity. The next chapters discuss type-theoretical approaches, including the ideal calculus, the theory of types, and Quine's mathematical logic and new foundations; intuitionistic conceptions of mathematics and its constructive character; and metamathematical and semantical approaches, such as the Hilbert program. This book will be of interest to mathematicians, logicians, and statisticians. (shrink)

Proposes an innovative rethinking of Aristotle’s work as a system that integrates his theology with his doctrine of reproduction and life. In this deep rethinking of Aristotle’s work, Abraham P. Bos argues that scholarship on Aristotle’s philosophy has erred since antiquity in denying the connection between his theology and his doctrine of reproduction and life in the earthly sphere. Beginning with an analysis of God’s role in the Aristotelian system, Bos explores how this relates to other elements of his (...) philosophy, especially to his theory of reproduction. The argument he develops is that in talking about the cosmos, Aristotle rejected Plato’s metaphor of artisanal production by a divine Demiurge in favor of a biotic metaphor based on the transmission of life in reproduction, in which pneuma—not breath as it is often interpreted but the life-bearing spirit in animals and plants—plays a key and sustaining role as the vital principle in all that lives. In making this case, he defends the authenticity of the treatises De Mundo and De Spiritu as Aristotle’s, and demonstrates Aristotle’s works as a unified system that sharply and comprehensively refutes Plato’s, and in particular replaces Plato’s doctrine of the soul with a theory in which the soul is clearly distinguished from the intellect. “Bos offers a fresh, interesting, and important perspective. His interpretation will be very controversial, but if he is right, the standard Anglo-American interpretation of Aristotle will have to change radically.” — Malcolm Wilson, author of Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature. (shrink)

Contemporary pain literature increasingly acknowledges the need of a multidimensional approach to pain, which accounts for its complex biological, psychological and social components. This is reflected in the recently revised definition of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and some contemporary philosophical positions. This paper addresses the need to offer a theoretical approach that integrates the biopsychosocial and qualitative multidimensionality of pain by developing the “social grounding view of pain”. My focus is on seeking a multidimensional philosophical (...) approach that accounts not only for its complex biological and psychological aspects but also and specifically does justice to its social dimension. I draw from some of the most recent multidimensional theoretical and methodological approaches that attempt to account for the social component of pain, including enactivism and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), to propose the advancement of the social grounding view, which has a particular focus on socially shared linguistic concepts in relation to the meaning and modulation of pain. More specifically, the social grounding view is based on the argument that the meaning of the experience of pain is determined in part by socially shareable linguistic concepts habitually associated with pain. I test this view against empirical cases drawn from pain neuroscience education (PNE) and try to demonstrate how the modification of the linguistic concepts of pain could be used effectively to modulate its experience. (shrink)

Among others we will prove that the equational theory of $\omega$ dimensional representable polyadic equality algebras is not schema axiomatizable. This result is in interesting contrast with the Daigneault-Monk representation theorem, which states that the class of representable polyadic algebras is finite schema-axiomatizable. We will also show that the complexity of the equational theory of RPEA$_\omega$ is also extremely high in the recursion theoretic sense. Finally, comparing the present negative results with the positive results of Ildiko Sain and Viktor Gyuris (...) [12], the following methodological conclusions will be drawn: The negative properties of polyadic algebras can be removed by switching from what we call the "polyadic algebraic paradigm" to the "cylindric algebraic paradigm". (shrink)

In this volume, a distinguished philosopher and moral rights theorist examines important changes that have occurred in our thinking about rights since first mention of them was made in early modern times. His inquiry is framed by an opening question and a concluding response. The question is whether the Greeks had any conception of a moral right. Some argue that they did not, on the ground that they had no word for a right. Others claim that they did, since they (...) employed certain locutions, the equivalents of which in our language are tied to some notion of a moral right. Professor Melden reviews in detail some of the most important historical conceptions of rights and examines serious questions raised by the fact that there have been striking changes in our thinking about rights. His discussion elucidates the place of moral rights in the broader network of moral concepts, along with the role they should play in our moral lives. Among the fundamental issues raised and discussed are those concerning the ways in which we are to understand various sorts of rights, the relation of special moral rights to our basic human rights, the now familiar claim that there are animal rights, the nature of moral progress, and the dream of a moral science. (shrink)

Religion and Morality seeks to answer two fundamental questions regarding the relation between religion and morality. The first is the puzzle posed by Socrates, the so-called 'Euthyphro dilemma', which asks: is morality valuable by virtue of its intrinsic importance and worth, or is morality valuable because, and only because, God approves it and commands us to follow its dictates? The second question is raised by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. He asks: Is a conflict between religion and morality possible? Does (...) God ever demand that we neglect our moral commitments? The discussion on these questions is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, we discuss the idea that morality depends on religion. The authors distinguish two types of dependence: strong dependence, according to which the very existence, or validity, of moral obligations depends on God's command, and weak dependence, according to which though morality itself is independent of God, God (or belief in God) is necessary to enable human beings to know their moral duties and to carry them out. The authors reject the strong dependence thesis, as well as most versions of the weak dependence. The third part of the book discusses different versions of the view that religion might conflict with morality. The authors reject this view, and show that very few religious thinkers would follow it all the way through to its ultimate consequences. The book has implications for the philosophy of religion, in its emphasis on the centrality of the moral element in religion, and for moral philosophy, in its highlighting, among other things, of the nature of moral judgments. (shrink)

The notion of ultratopologies was introduced in [6] motivated by the model theory of first and higher order logics. In [6] we established some model theoretical applications of ultratopologies, for example, we provided a purely set theoretical characterization for classes de.nable by second order existential formulas. The present note deals with topological properties of ultratopologies, like density and compactness.

Which ultraproducts preserve the validity of formulas of higher order logics? To answer this question, we will introduce natural topologies on ultraproducts. We will show, that ultraproducts preserving certain higher order formulas can be characterized in terms of these topologies. As an application of the above results, we provide a constructive, purely model theoretic characterization for classes definable by second order existential formulas.

That a science of human conduct is possible, that what any man may do even in moments of the most sober and careful reflection can be understood and explained, has seemed to many a philosopher to cast doubt upon our common view that any human action can ever be said to be truly free. This book, first published in 1961, into crucially important issues that are often ignored in the familiar arguments for and against the possibility of free action. These (...) issues are brought to light and examined in some detail. (shrink)

Objective To compare the perspectives of medical students in the preclinical and clinical phases of medical training on the issue of rationing scarce medical resources in times of crisis. Methods Questionnaire-based cross-sectional study. Results A total of 201 participants took part in the study, with 100 participants in the preclinical phase group, and 101 in the clinical phase group. A multivariable analysis found that just 14.9% (n = 34) of the clinical phase students were willing to give a short-supplied blood (...) unit to the first-arrived patient to the emergency department when more patients are expected compared to 63.9% in the preclinical group (n = 62) ( p < 0.001, OR = 0.75 95% CI: 0.029−0.192). Seventy-four percent (n = 74) of the clinical phase students were found to be willing to remove a patient from a respirator to allocate it to an ill child compared to 35.7% (n = 35) in the preclinical phase group ( p < 0.001, OR = 4.168 95% CI: 1.931−8.998). Of the clinical phase group, 46.6% (n = 41) were willing to allocate a short supplied flu medicine to a patient with poor prognosis compared to 57.7% (n = 56) in the preclinical phase group ( p = 0.04, OR = 0.457 95% CI: 0.216−0.966). Conclusion Clinical exposure during training may affect the way medical students make ethical decisions, independent of age, sex, as well as marital and parental status. (shrink)

Abraham Pais's Subtle Is the Lord was a publishing phenomenon: a mathematically sophisticated exposition of the science and the life of Albert Einstein that reached a huge audience and won an American Book Award. Reviewers hailed the book as "a monument to sound scholarship and graceful style", "an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man", and "a fine book". In this groundbreaking new volume, Pais undertakes a history of the physics of matter and of physical forces since the discovery of (...) x-rays. The book attempts to relate not only what has happened over the last hundred years but why it happened the way it did, what it was like for those scientists involved, and how what at the time may have seemed a series of bizarre or unrelated events, now with hindsight emerges as a logical sequence of events. Pais, a noted physicist, was personally involved in many of the developments he describes, and thus Inward Bound, like his earlier book, is filled with unique insights into the world of big and small physics. Between 1895 and 1983, the period he covers, the smallest distances explored have shrunk a hundred millionfold, Pais notes. Along this incompletely traveled "road inward," scientists have established markers that later generations will rank among the principal monuments of the twentieth century. In alternating technical and nontechnical sections, this magisterial survey richly conveys what has been discovered about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject, and the forces that act on them. But the advances have certainly not come smoothly. The book shows that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of clarity and confusion, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big money. About the Author: Abraham Pais is Detlev W. Bronk Professor of Physics at the Rockefeller University. The author of the prizewinning biography of Einstein now undertakes a history of modern physics. (shrink)

Let be a countable ℵ0‐homogeneous structure. The primary motivation of this work is to study different amenability properties of (subgroups of) the automorphism group of ; the secondary motivation is to study the existence of weakly generic automorphisms of. Among others, we present sufficient conditions implying the existence of automorphism invariant probability measures on certain subsets of A and of ; we also present sufficient conditions implying that the theory of is amenable. More concretely, we show that if the set (...) of locally finite automorphisms of is dense (in particular, if has weakly generic tuples of automorphisms of arbitrary finite length), then there exists a finitely additive probability measure μ on the subsets of definable with parameters such that μ is invariant under. Moreover, if is saturated and the set of its locally finite automorphisms is dense (in particular, if is saturated and has weak generics), then the theory of is amenable. (shrink)

In [3] a certain family of topological spaces was introduced on ultraproducts. These spaces have been called ultratopologies and their definition was motivated by model theory of higher order logics. Ultratopologies provide a natural extra topological structure for ultraproducts. Using this extra structure in [3] some preservation and characterization theorems were obtained for higher order logics. The purely topological properties of ultratopologies seem interesting on their own right. We started to study these properties in [2], where some questions remained open. (...) Here we present the solutions of two such problems. More concretely we show 1. that there are sequences of finite sets of pairwise different cardinalities such that in their certain ultraproducts there are homeomorphic ultratopologies and 2. if A is an infinite ultraproduct of finite sets, then every ultratopology on A contains a dense subset D such that |D| < |A|. (shrink)

By a celebrated theorem of Morley, a theory T is ℵ1‐categorical if and only if it is κ‐categorical for all uncountable κ. In this paper we are taking the first steps towards extending Morley's categoricity theorem “to the finite”. In more detail, we are presenting conditions, implying that certain finite subsets of certain ℵ1‐categorical T have at most one n‐element model for each natural number (counting up to isomorphism, of course).