Wolfson, using literary analysis, produced an excellent study of the mystical views of Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavich Rebbe. This work should serve as paradigmatic for the study of Jewish mystical thought.

_ Source: _Volume 24, Issue 2, pp 300 - 317 This article examines R. Zvi Yehudah Kook’s reading of two earlier thinkers who were influential in the formulation of his thought—the Maharal of Prague and R. Avraham Azulai. I argue that his creative and unique reading of these texts exemplifies a fascinating dialogue he held with earlier sources, which he interpreted and infused with his own theological postulates. Here I explore his theory of the unique nature of the Jewish soul, (...) in both its collective and individual manifestations. The connection between R. Zvi Yehudah’s approach to interpreting earlier Jewish theological texts and that of his father, R. Avraham Itzhak HaCohen Kook, will also be discussed. (shrink)

Modern political thought arrived on the heels of two revolutionary realizations: We are not at the center of the universe (Copernicus), which was not created for us (Darwin). How might political theory respond to a third revolutionary realization, that we are not alone, that other creatures, sentient and highly intelligent, share our vast universe? We explore answers through a dialogue between two political theorists, a human and an alien. Rather than superimposing astropolitics upon anthropolitics, we use the encounter to ask (...) new questions, e.g., should PT foster bridges between humans and aliens, or harden the boundaries? Pitting Dark Forest Theory against the Campfire Theory, we outline the coming existential and existentialist turns in political theory, complementing Earth politics with exopolitics. (shrink)

Einleitung: Da Costa und das Marranenproblem. Die Gründung der Sephardischen Gemeinde in Amsterdam. Die Spaltung des Bewusstseins. Das Schicksal da Costas. Da Costa und Spinoza.--Propostas contra a tradição. Thesen gegen die Tradition.--Sobre a mortalidade da alma. Über die Sterblichkeit der Seele.--Exemplar humanae vitae. Ein Beispiel menschlichen Lebens.--Regesten.--Anmerkungen.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book (...) is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

The Descartes Dictionary is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought. The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discussing trends in research over the past four decades. The A-Z entries include clear (...) definitions of the key terms used in Descartes' writings and detailed synopses of his works. Also included are entries noting philosophical influences, of both figures that influenced Descartes and those that he in turn influenced. For anyone reading or studying Descartes, rationalism, or modern philosophy more generally, this original resource provides a wealth of useful information, analysis, and criticism. Including clear explanations of often complex terminology, The Descartes Dictionary covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Descartes' philosophy. (shrink)

Mientras que desde una perspectiva islámica los musulmanes debían ofrecer lealtad primordial a Dios y a Su mensaje, los lazos de parentesco podían poner en tela de juicio ese compromiso. Los ideales islámicos, articulados a través de diversos géneros literarios, reflejan esta tensión, presentando una priorización de la comunidad religiosa sobre la familia. Al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, los sentimientos de parentesco se utilizaban a menudo para inculcar ideales religiosos e identidad entre los miembros de la comunidad. La percepción islámica (...) primitiva y medieval de la autoridad materna ilustra bien este punto, ya que las madres musulmanas desempeñan un papel crucial en la formación de la identidad islámica de sus hijos. Sin embargo, en circunstancias opuestas, cuando la autoridad materna no musulmana estaba presente en entornos familiares dominados por el islam, se hacía necesaria una adaptación de las normas y reglamentos. En este ensayo, examino una serie de posturas islámicas relativas a los casos en que las madres, tanto musulmanas como no musulmanas, podían influir en las inclinaciones religiosas de sus hijos durante conflictos o diferencias interreligiosas. Estas posturas arrojan luz sobre una faceta adicional de los esfuerzos islámicos por preservar la integridad religiosa de los creyentes musulmanes, en particular de los niños musulmanes pequeños, dentro de un contexto religioso socialmente diverso. Aparecen en diversos géneros literarios con programas normativos, como el Corán, la exégesis coránica, las tradiciones proféticas, los compendios jurídicos, las biografías de los primeros musulmanes (ṣaḥāba), y literatura sobre etiqueta social (adab), que abarca desde el siglo I/VII al VII/XIII. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo realizar una reconstrucción teórica sobre la figura de Abraham como categoría central en la constitución de la subjetividad en el pensamiento judío y mostrar cómo se convierte en referente filosófico en la obra levinasiana. Para ello, se indagan las raíces judías de Levinas y de su obra, en la que la figura de Abraham aparece como principio de subjetivación ética en el proceso de constitución del pueblo de la alianza, en contraste con la figura griega (...) de Ulises. Entre los hallazgos de este estudio se encuentra a Abraham como la presencia de un yo que se abre al llamado del Otro, no para absorberlo en su mismidad, sino para constituirse como un ser-para-el-Otro y reconocer el obligatorio cumplimiento de las responsabilidades ineludibles con su existencia. Se describe, además, la metáfora como apertura y salida de sí que lleva al ser humano más allá de sí mismo. El artículo llega a la conclusión de que el pensamiento filosófico de Levinas, centrado principalmente en la ética, ha contribuido significativamente a nuestra comprensión del ser humano como un Otro esencial en las relaciones intersubjetivas. Esta concepción encuentra su fundamento directamente en la tradición judía, en contraposición a la tradición griega que ha estado en la base de gran parte de los desarrollos de la filosofía occidental. (shrink)

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

El presente artículo discute los conceptos de «autoconservación» y «trabajo» en Lo que aprendemos de los lirios del campo y las aves del cielo. El análisis del discurso edificante escrito por Kierkegaard en 1847 permite definir la perspectiva que el danés asume ante el proyecto filosófico de la Modernidad. A partir de una crítica a las concepciones estéticas y éticas de la vida, el autor edificante propone un modelo de existencia religiosa que combina la autoconservación y la dependencia.

El presente artículo discute la obra pseudónima de Kierkegaard “El reflejo de lo trágico antiguo en lo trágico moderno”. El joven esteta A traza una distinción entre la “culpa antigua” y la “culpa moderna”. A utiliza esta distinción para formular una potente crítica a la ética moderna. No obstante, dicha polémica contra los conceptos éticos de la Modernidad no implican un retorno a la moralidad trágica antigua.

En el actual contexto en reorganización por la influencia del ciberespacio cruzado, entre otras, por las contradicciones entre control y comunicación y por el impacto de las inteligencias artificiales damos cuenta del curso dirigido por Jesús Zamora Bonilla y titulado Filosofía del Futuro y el Futuro de la Filosofía (enero de 2023). En el mismo se ha dibujado el campo de los estudios del futuro y se ha reflexionado sobre el papel que en ellos pudiera jugar la filosofía. También se (...) ha vuelto a plantear el problema de sus condiciones de supervivencia. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

Standing at the edge of life's abyss, we seek meaningful order. We commonly find this 'symbolic immortality' in religion, civilization, state and nation. What happens, however, when the nation itself appears mortal? The Mortality and Morality of Nations seeks to answer this question, theoretically and empirically. It argues that mortality makes morality, and right makes might; the nation's sense of a looming abyss informs its quest for a higher moral ground, which, if reached, can bolster its vitality. The book investigates (...) nationalism's promise of moral immortality and its limitations via three case studies: French Canadians, Israeli Jews, and Afrikaners. All three have been insecure about the validity of their identity or the viability of their polity, or both. They have sought partial redress in existential self-legitimation: by the nation, of the nation and for the nation's very existence. (shrink)

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

WE must first state the subject of our inquiry and the faculty to which it belongs: its subject is demonstration and the faculty that carries it out demonstrative science.

The American and some other constitutions entrench property rights by requiring super majoritarian voting as a condition for amending or revoking their own provisions. Following Buchanan and Tullock [The Calculus of Consent, Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor), 1962], this paper analyzes individuals' interests behind a veil of ignorance, and shows that under some standard assumptions, a (simple) majoritarian rule should be adopted. This result changes if one assumes that preferences are consistent with the behavioral (...) phenomenon known as the endowment effect. It then follows that (at least some) property rights are best defended by super majoritarian protection. The paper then shows that its theoretical results are consistent with a number of doctrines underlying American Constitutional Law. (shrink)

Christians and Others in the Umayyad State. Edited by Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner. Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East, vol. 1. Chicago: riental Institute, University of Chicago, 2016. Pp. ix + 213. $24.95.

Uriel Weinreich was of the innovative and creative thinkers in the field of semantics in the twentieth century. This volume contains all of Weinreich's writings on semantics, including a number of papers that were not published in his lifetime. It includes the first paper on the universals of semantic theory, an analysis of the fundamental concepts of semantics and semiotics, and a critique of lexicography.

Die Buchreihe Konzepte der Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft gibt Aufschluss über Prinzipien, Probleme und Verfahrensweisen philologischer Forschung im weitesten Sinne und dient einer Bestimmung des Standorts der Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Die Reihe übergreift Einzelsprachen und Einzelliteraturen. Sie stellt sich in den Dienst der Reflexion und Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. Die Bände sind zum Teil informierende Einführungen, zum Teil wissenschaftliche Diskussionsbeiträge.

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article examines Harold Ramis’s 2005 noir comedy The Ice Harvest as the critically dystopian counter-panel to his beloved 1993 film Groundhog Day, a film frequently discussed within the paradigm of utopia. While starkly different in genre, tone, and reception, the two films comprise a dialectical dyad that registers the historical transition from the utopian cultural effervescence of the early 1990s to the tragic foreclosure of imaginative horizons and the dystopian transformation of economic, political, and social landscapes in the new (...) millennium. In The Ice Harvest, the author argues, this is achieved through a strategic reactivation of film noir as a variant of the critical dystopia. (shrink)

A clearly written, authoritative introduction to Taylor's work.