The interconnections, common interests, and other linkages between the Jewish and Islamic traditions have long been a matter of interest to academics. Today the need to understand these relationships, and to emphasize commonalities rather than conflicts, is of the greatest public interest. The present volume of studies, likely the first such collection in the scholarly literature, explores the full range of interconnections between Jews and Muslims in all fields (intellectual history, religion, philosophy, social history, etc.) and in all periods, from (...) the Middle Ages till today. The essays have been written by some twenty distinguished scholars from North America, Europe, and Israel. The volume is dedicated to our esteemed colleague Joel L. Kraemer, John Barrows Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School and on the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. In the course of his distinguished career Professor Kraemer has made major contributions to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of the Jews in the Arabic world, Islamic and Jewish philosophy and their sources in ancient philosophy, the humanistic renaissance in Islam (on which he published two seminal monographs), and Maimonides (on which he has published many important papers and is completing a biography and a translation of Maimonides' letters, to appear in the Yale Judaica Series). (shrink)

Under the enlightened rule of the Buyid dynasty the Islamic world witnessed an unequalled cultural renaissance. This book is an investigation into the nature of the environment in which the cultural transformation took place and into the cultural elite who were its bearers.

... the turn of the fourth/tenth century, in the province of Sijistan, Muhammad b. Tahir b. Bahram was born, known in the fullness of time as Abu Sulayman ...

Leading scholars have combined forces to produce this volume on the philosophy and legal views of Moses Maimonides (11381204) and the historical context in which he worked. The philosophical section examines Maimonides ethical~doctrine, his paradoxical life-style, his Guide of the Perplexed, his attitude to mysticism, his use of language, and his theory of astronomy. The legal section deals with law and medicine, the relation of Maimonides legal thought to the~Talmud, his doctrine of a just war, and his theory of redemption (...) and Messianism. The history section examines Maimonides accession to the position of head of the Jewish community in its historical context at the time of the rise of the Ayyubid dynasty under Saladin. (PRINT ON DEMAND). (shrink)

Weaving together state-of-the-art research, theory, and clinical insights, this book provides a new understanding of the unconscious and its centrality in human functioning. The authors review heuristics, implicit memory, implicit learning, attribution theory, implicit motivation, automaticity, affective versus cognitive salience, embodied cognition, and clinical theories of unconscious functioning. They integrate this work with cognitive neuroscience views of the mind to create an empirically supported model of the unconscious. Arguing that widely used psychotherapies--including both psychodynamic and cognitive approaches--have not kept pace (...) with current science, the book identifies promising directions for clinical practice. Subject areas/Key words: unconscious processes, human consciousness, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, implicit learning, implicit memory, implicit motivation, automaticity, cognition, subconscious, psychodynamic psychotherapy, mind, computational neuroscience, empirical research Audience: Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and other mental health practitioners, as well as researchers and students of clinical and personality psychology and psychopathology. (shrink)

“Intervention” is not synonymous with “care.” For an intervention to constitute care—which patients should have a right to access—it must be technically feasible and licit. Now these criteria do not prove sufficient; numerous archaic interventions remain feasible and legally permissible, yet are now bywords for spurious care. Therefore, we propound another necessary condition for an intervention to become care: the physician must rationally judge the intervention to be conducive to the patient’s good. Consequently, the right of access-to-care relies on physicians (...) being free to practice medicine in accord with their consciences, conscience being the rational faculty with which they judge the reasonableness of even mundane medical decisions. Since physicians operate as part of a community, it is further necessary to consider when central bodies may reasonably compel physicians to engage in interventions that the physician believes are not consistent with the patient’s good and/or are not congruent with the purposes of medicine. (shrink)

In developing their policy on paediatric medical assistance in dying (MAID), DeMichelis, Shaul and Rapoport decide to treat euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide as ethically and practically equivalent to other end-of-life interventions, particularly palliative sedation and withdrawal of care (WOC). We highlight several flaws in the authors’ reasoning. Their argument depends on too cursory a dismissal of intention, which remains fundamental to medical ethics and law. Furthermore, they have not fairly presented the ethical analyses justifying other end-of-life decisions, analyses and decisions (...) that were generally accepted long before MAID was legal or considered ethical. Forgetting or misunderstanding the analyses would naturally lead one to think MAID and other end-of-life decisions are morally equivalent. Yet as we recall these well-developed analyses, it becomes clear that approving of some forms of sedation and WOC does not commit one to MAID. Paediatric patients and their families can rationally and coherently reject MAID while choosing palliative care and WOC. Finally, the authors do not substantiate their claim that MAID is like palliative care in that it alleviates suffering. It is thus unreasonable to use this supposition as a warrant for their proposed policy. (shrink)

This book originated at a small and informal workshop held in December of 1992 in Idyllwild, a relatively secluded resort village situated amid forests in the ...

ABSTRACTAlexithymia is characterised by a lack of words for emotional experiences and it has been implicated in deficits in emotion processing. Research in this area has typically focused on judgem...

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top‐down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting participants with major/minor triad continua after brief musical contexts. Two experiments yielded results that differed from classic results in speech perception. In speech, context generally expands the category of the expected (...) stimuli. We found the opposite in music: The major/minor boundary shifted toward the expected category, contracting it. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that musical expectancy can feed back to affect lower‐level perceptual processes. However, it may do so in a way that differs fundamentally from what has been seen in other domains. (shrink)

Pesher Naḥum: Texts and Studies in Jewish History from Antiquity through the Middle Ages Presented to Norman Golb. Edited by Joel L. Kraemer and Michael G. Wechsler. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, vol. 66. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2012. Pp. xxiv + 359 + 55*, plates. $49.95. [Distributed by The David Brown Book Co., Oakville, CT.].

Book reviewed in this article: Public Duties: The Moral Obligations of Government Officials. Edited by Joel L. Fleishman, Lance Liebman, and Mark H. Moore.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought rapid changes to travel, learning environments, work conditions, and social support, which caused stress for many University students. Research with young people has revealed music listening to be among their most effective strategies for coping with stress. As such, this survey of 402 first-year Australian University students examined the effectiveness of music listening during COVID-19 compared with other stress management strategies, whether music listening for stress management was related to well-being, and whether differences emerged between domestic (...) and international students. We also asked participants to nominate a song that helped them to cope with COVID-19 stress and analyzed its features. Music listening was among the most effective stress coping strategies, and was as effective as exercise, sleep, and changing location. Effectiveness of music listening as a coping strategy was related to better well-being but not to level of COVID-19 related stress. Although international students experienced higher levels of COVID-19 stress than domestic students, well-being was comparable in the two cohorts. Nominated songs tended to be negative in valence and moderate in energy. No correlations were found between any self-report measure and the valence and energy of nominated coping songs. These findings suggest that although domestic and international students experienced different levels of stress resulting from COVID-19, music listening remained an effective strategy for both cohorts, regardless of the type of music they used for coping. (shrink)

The renewed interest in the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics in recent years has led us to study John von Neumann’s 1929 article on the quantum ergodic theorem. We have found this almost forgotten article, which until now has been available only in German, to be a treasure chest, and to be much misunderstood. In it, von Neumann studied the long-time behavior of macroscopic quantum systems. While one of the two theorems announced in his title, the one he calls the (...) “quantum H-theorem,” is actually a much weaker statement than Boltzmann’s classical H-theorem, the other theorem, which he calls the “quantum ergodic theorem,” is a beautiful and very non-trivial result. It expresses a fact we call “normal typicality” and can be summarized as follows: For a “typical” finite family of commuting macroscopic observables, every initial wave function ψ0 from a micro-canonical energy shell so evolves that for most times t in the long run, the joint probability distribution of these observables obtained from ψ is close to.. (shrink)

When do probability distribution functions (PDFs) about future climate misrepresent uncertainty? How can we recognise when such misrepresentation occurs and thus avoid it in reasoning about or communicating our uncertainty? And when we should not use a PDF, what should we do instead? In this paper we address these three questions. We start by providing a classification of types of uncertainty and using this classification to illustrate when PDFs misrepresent our uncertainty in a way that may adversely affect decisions. We (...) then discuss when it is reasonable and appropriate to use a PDF to reason about or communicate uncertainty about climate. We consider two perspectives on this issue. On one, which we argue is preferable, available theory and evidence in climate science basically excludes using PDFs to represent our uncertainty. On the other, PDFs can legitimately be provided when resting on appropriate expert judgement and recognition of associated risks. Once we have specified the border between appropriate and inappropriate uses of PDFs, we explore alternatives to their use. We briefly describe two formal alternatives, namely imprecise probabilities and possibilistic distribution functions, as well as informal possibilistic alternatives. We suggest that the possibilistic alternatives are preferable. -/- . (shrink)

This paper examines the three US national security strategies released by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama since 9/11. These national security strategies are required presidential statements describing US plans for national security. The authors analyze Bush’s two and Obama’s one post-9/11 national security strategies and evaluate the argumentative framework of imperial righteousness in the documents. The rhetoric of American imperial righteousness contains four themes: national security, the nature of the enemy, freedom and democracy, and American morality. While there (...) are some differences between the documents, the authors argue that Bush and Obama both promoted the idea of imperial righteousness in their plans for American national security. Moreover, the four themes of imperial righteousness worked together effectively to advance America’s interests in world affairs. (shrink)

Rereading Renée C. Fox's “A Sociological Perspective on Organ Transplantation and Hemodialysis,” published in 1970, one is likely to be struck more by continuity than by change. The most pressing of the social, policy, and ethical concerns that Fox raised remain problematic fifty years later. We still struggle with scientific and clinical uncertainty, with the boundary between experimentation and therapy, and with the cost of organ replacement therapies and disparities in how they are allocated. We still have an imperfect understanding (...) of transplant immune responses. We still debate when a potential donor “actually” dies, and we still seem to think better empirical criteria could harmonize the diverse religious, cultural, and socioeconomic values of patients, providers, third‐party payers, and policy‐makers. Organ transplantation was for Fox both a particular case unfolding in time and an entryway for discussing the difficult moral questions presented by many new medical technologies in a context of high demand and limited resources. (shrink)

There have been recent concerns about an “epidemic of loneliness” during the pandemic, given the pervasiveness of loneliness in the population and its harmful effects on health and well-being. Therefore, it is important to establish the correlates of loneliness. The purpose of the current study was to explore how loneliness relates to a construct termed mattering, which is the feeling of being important to other people. Mattering was assessed with multiple measures in the current study (e.g., mattering in general, fears (...) of not mattering, and mattering to peers). A sample of 172 female psychology undergraduate students aged 18–25 years completed self-report measures of general mattering, mattering to peers, anti-mattering, fear of not mattering, and state and trait loneliness. As predicted, lower levels of both general mattering and mattering to peers were associated with higher state loneliness. Higher feelings of anti-mattering (feelings of being invisible and insignificant to others) and fears of not mattering were associated with greater trait loneliness, as well as a reduced sense of mattering to friends. The findings illustrate that feeling as though one does not matter to others (i.e., feeling insignificant and unimportant) is associated with increased state and trait loneliness among young women. Implications are discussed for loneliness theory and how these results can enhance both clinical understanding and practice. (shrink)

This study examined the relationship between individual differences in executive functions (EF; assessed by measures of working memory, Stroop, trail making, and verbal fluency) and ability to down-regulate and up-regulate responses to emotionally evocative film clips. To ensure a wide range of EF, 48 participants with diverse neurodegenerative disorders and 21 older neurologically normal ageing participants were included. Participants were exposed to three different movie clips that were designed to elicit a mix of disgust and amusement. While watching the films (...) they were either instructed to watch, down-regulate, and up-regulate their visible emotional responses. Heart rate and facial behaviours were monitored throughout. Emotion regulatory ability was operationalised as changes in heart rate and facial behaviour in the down- and up-regulation conditions, controlling for responses in the watch condition. Results indicated that higher verbal fluency scores were related to greater ability to regulate emotion in both the down-regulation and up-regulation conditions. This finding remained significant even after controlling for age and general cognitive functioning. No relationships were found between emotion regulation and the other EF measures. We believe these results derive from differences among EF measures, with verbal-fluency performance best capturing the complex sequence of controlled planning, activation, and monitoring required for successful emotion regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of emotion–cognition interaction, suggesting a link between emotion-regulatory abilities and individual differences in complex executive functions. (shrink)

Prior research indicates that managers’ dark personality traits increase their tendency to engage in disruptive and unethical organizational behaviors including accounting earnings management. Other research suggests that the prevalence of dark personalities in management may represent an accidental byproduct of selecting managers with accompanying desirable attributes that fit the stereotype of a “strong leader.” Our paper posits that organizations may hire some managers who have dark personality traits because their willingness to push ethical boundaries aligns with organizational objectives, particularly in (...) the accounting context where ethical considerations are especially important. Using several validation studies and experiments, we find that experienced executives and recruiting professionals favor hiring a candidate with dark personality traits into an accounting management position over an otherwise better-qualified candidate when the hiring organization faces pressure to manage earnings. Our results help to illuminate why individuals with dark personality traits may effectively compete for high-level accounting positions. (shrink)

In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Diodoros Chronos gave a temporal definition of necessity. Because it connects modality and temporality, this definition is of interest to philosophers working within branching time or branching space-time models. This definition of necessity can be formalized and treated within a logical framework. We give a survey of the several known modal and temporal logics of abstract space-time structures based on the real numbers and the integers, considering three different accessibility relations between spatio-temporal (...) points. (shrink)

Sociologists who use in-depth interview methods have become sensitized to the ways that race-ethnicity and class can form barriers to rapport with respondents, but the question of gender has been largely unexamined. This article compares data from two independently conducted in-depth interview studies of male nurses: one by a female researcher and one by a male researcher. Observed differences in how the men in the samples framed their responses to questions in the two studies are discussed. It is argued that (...) in-depth interviewers can and should become sensitized to respondents' negotiation of the gendered context of the interaction, but the existing proscriptions against cross-gender research are challenged. (shrink)