In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 555-575 [Access article in PDF] Measurer of All Things:John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology Zur Shalev [Figures]Writing from Istanbul to Peter Turner, one of his colleagues at Merton College, Oxford, John Greaves was deeply worried: Onley I wonder that in so long time since I left England I should neither have received my brasse quadrant which (...) I left to be finished for my journey thither, nor any notice of it [...]. I agreed with mr. Allen upon price and the time that he should finish it, if he hath failed me he hath done me the greatest injury that can be. 1A great injury indeed, because Greaves's journey to Italy and the Levant was all about measuring—luckily the instrument did reach him at some later stage. The thirty-six-year-old Professor of Geometry at Gresham College was taking the measurements of countless monuments and objects in the locations he visited. In Rome he measured, among many other ancient structures, Cestius' Pyramid and St. Peter's basilica. In Lucca, deeply impressed, he counted his paces around the beautiful city walls. In Siena he observed together with a "Mathematical Professor" one of the Sidera Medicea using "a glass." In Egypt he even hurt his eyes gazing at the sun, looking for sunspots and measuring its diameter. 2 His measuring mission, however, culminated in the fixing of the [End Page 555] latitudes of Istanbul, Rhodes, and Alexandria. As Bishop Juxton wrote before the trip to Greaves's employers at Gresham College (apparently using Greaves's own promotional language): This worke I find by the best astronomers, especially by Ticho Brache [ sic ] and Kepler, hath beene much desired as tending to the advancement of that science, and I hope it wil be an honour to that nation and prove ours if we first observe it. 3A mathematician-Orientalist, commanding the ancient and modern astronomical and geographical literature of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian authors, Greaves was arguably the best qualified European at the period to perform the task. That he miscalculated the latitude of Rhodes is of less consequence for his present-day readers. 4 However, one of the most obscure and therefore telling of his measurement activities was the survey of the Pyramids of Giza, which resulted in the Pyramidographia (1646). 5 This remarkable learned treatise and travel account hybrid, which is at the focus of the present study, gives us a glimpse into the rich and complex world of scientific antiquarians.Greaves is most conveniently remembered today as an Orientalist. While we must be thankful to Edward Said for broadening the meaning of Orient-alism—from an academic discipline, accumulating objective knowledge of the East, into a much wider cultural discourse, his emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the European colonial mindset is less useful for making historical sense of what early modern Orientalists were doing—physically and culturally. We can understand Greaves's "Oriental" enterprise in its [End Page 556] depth and variety only within long established European traditions of scholarship and keeping the intellectual concerns of his time in mind. 6But beyond articulating for us the nature of early Orientalism, the Pyramidographia, as well as Greaves's entire scientific career, situated in their wider European context, provide a fine entry point into a foreign world of learned practices and methods. It teaches us how well into the seventeenth century astronomy and philology, observation and bookishness, could coalesce in one figure, in one enterprise. 7 We still lack a modern biography of Greaves, a complex protagonist of a complex period, and even a full evaluation of his intellectual work. While this paper surely cannot compensate for that, I do attempt here a brief exposition of Greaves's Pyramidographia. 8Modern historians of archaeology and Egyptology, preoccupied mostly with the disciplines' progress and development of scientific standards, have noted the Pyramidographia in passing and praised its precise language and rigorous research... (shrink)

We discuss the evolution of the distributive double noun (quivis) in biblical Hebrew. This construction developed from an asyndeton in Classical Biblical Hebrew (e.g., איש איש) into a syndeton in Late Biblical Hebrew (e.g., איש ואיש), a process that makes it an important diachronic marker in classifying and analyzing these two varieties of the language.

Ethical attitudes towards pregnant women were examined by using a questionnaire among 50 nurses, 50 midwives and 100 nursing students (third and fourth years). The main findings show that nurses and students differ in: (1) their knowledge of the Code of Ethics; (2) their protection of patients' rights with regard to secrecy and privacy; and (3) their reporting of mistakes. These findings highlight the need for more serious study of ethics among senior professional nurses.

This paper discusses the stem variance of the root ḥ­b­q in the Bible, suggesting that its inconsistent conjugation does not reflect the original Biblical Hebrew, but rather results from an anachronistic pronunciation created by the Masoretes. The paper reviews the research of Masoretic anachronisms and the methodologies developed to identify them, applying these to the case of the root ḥ­b­q. It concludes that ḥ­b­q belongs to a specific type of Masoretic anachronism, in which original Qal forms were misvocalized by the (...) Masoretes as Piel under the influence of Mishnaic Hebrew. After presenting biblical and extra-biblical evidence to support this conclusion, the paper briefly discusses some of its main implications for the diachronic study of ancient Hebrew: the "late spelling paradox," the scope of the phenomenon of substituting Piel for Qal, and the relation between Masoretic anachronisms and the scholarly debate about the linguistic reliability of the Masoretic text. (shrink)

The research reported in this article examined the influence of nurses’ attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control on maintaining patients’ privacy during hospitalization. The data were gathered from 109 nurses in six internal medicine wards at an Israeli hospital. The research was based on the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior. A positive and significant correlation was shown between nurses’ attitude to promoting and maintaining patient privacy and their planned behavior, while perceived behavioral control was the best variable (...) for predicting the nurses’ behavior. Better educated nurses believed that they had fewer resources and anticipated more obstacles in acting to promote and maintain patient privacy. This research adds a new dimension to what is already known about nurses’ attitudes to maintaining patients’ privacy, nurses’ planned behavior and their actual behavior. The practical implications of the findings are the identification of factors that influence the attitudes and behavior of nursing staff, which, in turn, will enable allocation of resources for solving difficulties and removing obstacles. The results will allow the formulation of educational programs to guide staff and also the application of policies based on both patient and nursing staff needs. (shrink)

This paper discusses the occupational health nurse's dilemmas by illustrating two cases faced by nurses in occupational health practice and setting out their analysis according to a decision-making model. The counter-interests, which may offend the principles of conserving professional occupational ethics among service consumers and employers as well as fellow professionals, are emphasized. This paper also describes the complex problems involved in the worker's safety and the safeguarding of their autonomy, while preserving interpersonal relations among the various people concerned.

Political honors are ubiquitous in public life, whether in the form of public monuments, street names, or national holidays. Yet such honors have received scant attention from normative political theorists. Tackling this gap, I begin by criticizing a desert-based approach to political honors. I then argue that morally appropriate honors are best understood as marking and reinforcing the moral commitments of the collective in whose name they are being awarded. I show how this thesis clarifies and organizes core intuitions regarding (...) a variety of honors, from those commemorating slave-owning founders of the United States to the Nobel Peace Prize. (shrink)

In the latter half of the 20th century, Western medicine moved death from the home to the hospital. As a result, the process of dying seems to have lost its spiritual dimension, and become a matter of prolonging material life by means of medical technology. The novel quandaries that arose led in turn to medico-legal regulation. This paper describes the recent regulation of dying in Israel under its Dying Patient Law, 2005. The Law recognizes advance directives in principle, but limits (...) their effect and form through complex medico-legal artifices. It reflects a culture that places high value on both scientific medicine and the sanctity of life as such, and illustrates a medical culture that pitches battle against death. At the same time, the Law constructs the will of the individual in a medico-legal language that is alien to the lay person. The paper suggests an alternative approach to advance care planning that is patient-centred and addresses the psycho-social needs of the individual in terms of her relational autonomy. From this perspective, advance care planning becomes an opportunity to extract the patient from the medical context and allow her to speak about her approaching death with close ones in her own terms of reference. To this end, there is a need for facilitation of an intimate encounter where patients can speak about their concerns with their loved ones. The paper also presents a methodological approach of attentive listening, which can be applied across diverse cultures and circumstances. (shrink)

The rapid development of assisted reproduction technologies for the treatment of infertility appears to empower women through expanding their individual choice, but it is also creating new forms of suffering for them and their collaborators, especially in the context of transnational third-party reproduction. This paper explores the possibility of framing the ethical discourse around third-party reproduction by bringing attention to concerns of altruistic empathy for women who collaborate in the reproductive process, in addition to those of individualistic choice. This would (...) entail moving beyond an ethic of liberty that is based on self-interest and the language of rights, to an alternative ethic of care that is based on self-restraint and the language of responsibilities. An ethic of care and responsibility would cultivate the empathetic self-reflection of the autonomous actor in relation to those others who are part of the enterprise of bringing a child into the world. (shrink)

This book provides a novel account of integrity and its relevance to both individual and collective conduct, and analyses a wide range of practical policy problems.

This essay critically engages proposals by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar meant to combat ‘the resource curse.’ Pogge and Wenar call for boycotts against stealing oppressors, sharing the expectation that the boycotts will significantly contribute to economic and political reform in the target countries. In contrast, I argue that liberal democracies should indeed stop trading with dictators and civil warriors, but for inward rather than outward looking reasons. We, the citizens of liberal democracies through our elected governments, ought to boycott (...) severely oppressive regimes for the sake of our own moral integrity*simply in order to stop being complicit in what is effectively massive scale armed robbery. This inward looking thesis is distinctive in three ways. First, it contrasts with the dominant assumption that global reform must be grounded in the achievement of better political and economic outcomes for others. Second, the inward look manages to avoid the profound empirical uncertainty associated with any attempt to predict the direct effects of global rule changes on domestic institutions. Third, by isolating each democracy’s responsibility for each case of illicit trade, the inward looking strategy deals more adequately than the outward view with collective action problems, and therefore has a greater chance of grounding actual reforms, with whatever prospects for better outcomes they may entail.Keywords: resource curse; boycotts; democratic trade; Thomas Pogge; Leif Wenar. (shrink)

This essay critically engages proposals by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar meant to combat ‘the resource curse.’ Pogge and Wenar call for boycotts against stealing oppressors, sharing the expectation that the boycotts will significantly contribute to economic and political reform in the target countries. In contrast, I argue that liberal democracies should indeed stop trading with dictators and civil warriors, but for inward rather than outward looking reasons. We, the citizens of liberal democracies through our elected governments, ought to boycott (...) severely oppressive regimes for the sake of our own moral integrity*simply in order to stop being complicit in what is effectively massive scale armed robbery. This inward looking thesis is distinctive in three ways. First, it contrasts with the dominant assumption that global reform must be grounded in the achievement of better political and economic outcomes for others. Second, the inward look manages to avoid the profound empirical uncertainty associated with any attempt to predict the direct effects of global rule changes on domestic institutions. Third, by isolating each democracy’s responsibility for each case of illicit trade, the inward looking strategy deals more adequately than the outward view with collective action problems, and therefore has a greater chance of grounding actual reforms, with whatever prospects for better outcomes they may entail.Keywords: resource curse; boycotts; democratic trade; Thomas Pogge; Leif Wenar. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the perception of actual and ideal ethical climate type among 95 nurses working in the internal medicine wards of one central hospital in the state of Israel. We also examined whether nurses’ demographic characteristics influence that perception and if a relationship between perceptions of an actual and an ideal ethical climate type influences nurses’ job satisfaction. A questionnaire composed of three subquestionnaires was administered and the responses analyzed using multiple linear regressions, analysis of variance and (...) Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The results demonstrated that demographic characteristics (such as: gender, job tenure and level of education) partially influence the perception of an ideal ethical climate. Incongruence in perceptions of ‘caring’ and ‘independence’ climate types indicated a decline in nurses’ job satisfaction, while perception of actual ‘caring’ and ‘service’ climates positively influenced all aspects of job satisfaction. We recommend constructing training programs emphasizing the ethics of nursing practice and also to help lead nurses to clarify an ethical framework and guide nursing staff in dealing with ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

I present a new challenge to the Rawlsian insistence on ideal theory as a compass orienting concrete policy choices. My challenge, focusing on global politics, consists of three claims. First, I contend that our global ideal can become more ambitious over time. Second, I argue that Rawlsian ideal theory’s level of ambition might change because of concrete policy choices, responding to moral failures which can be identified and resolved without ideal theory. Third, I argue that we currently face such potentially (...) transformative choices. I conclude that these choices are analytically prior to, rather than derivative from, global ideal theory. (shrink)

We consider bargaining situations where two players evaluate outcomes with reference-dependent utility functions, analyzing the effect of differing levels of loss aversion on bargaining outcomes. We find that as with risk aversion, increasing loss aversion for a player leads to worse outcomes for that player in bargaining situations. An extension of Nash's axioms is used to define a solution for bargaining problems with exogenous reference points. Using this solution concept we endogenize the reference points into the model and find a (...) unique solution giving reference points and outcomes that satisfy two reasonable properties, which we predict would be observed in a steady state. The resulting solution also emerges in two other approaches, a strategic (non-cooperative) approach using Rubinstein's (1982) alternating offers model and a dynamic approach in which we find that even under weak assumptions, outcomes and reference points converge to the steady state solution from any non-equilibrium state. (shrink)

Key words: code of ethics; rejected patients; terrorism; terrorist victims; terrorists; values.

How can adverse experiences in early life, such as maltreatment, exert such powerful negative effects on health decades later? The answer may lie in changes to DNA. New research suggests that exposure to stress can accelerate the erosion of DNA segments called telomeres. Shorter telomere length correlates with chronological age and also disease morbidity and mortality. Thus, telomere erosion is a potential mechanism linking childhood stress to health problems later in life. However, an array of mechanistic, methodological, and basic biological (...) questions must be addressed in order to translate telomere discoveries into clinical applications for monitoring health and predicting disease risk. This paper covers the current state of the science and lays out new research directions. (shrink)

The military service of combat soldiers may pose many threats to their well being and often take a toll on body and mind, influencing the physical and emotional make-up of combatants and veterans. The current study aims to enhance our knowledge about the combat experiences and the challenges that female soldiers face both during and after their service. The study is based on qualitative methods and narrative analysis of in-depth semi-structured personal interviews with twenty military veterans. It aims to analyze (...) the narratives of American and Israeli female combat soldiers regarding their military service, with emphasis on the soldiers’ descriptions, in their own words, about their difficulties, challenges, coping and successes during their service and transition to civilian life. A recurring theme in the interviews with the veterans of both militaries was the need to be heard and the fact that societies, therapists, and military institutions do not always truly listen to female veterans’ experiences and are not really interested in what actually ails them. Our research suggests that conventional methods used in research relating to veterans might at times be inadequate, because the inherent categorization might abstract, pathologize, and fragment a wide array of soldiers’ modes of post-combat being. Moreover, female veterans’ voices will not be fully heard unless we allow them to be active participants in generating knowledge about themselves. (shrink)

Global justice seems to be all about "us" treating "them," especially "their" problem of extreme poverty. This article argues that there is such a thing as our problem of global justice, and that it must be both temporally and logically prior to the problem of global justice. In order to establish this thesis, I seek to corroborate three main claims: that our elected governments are actively complicit in dictators' de facto armed robbery of their population's resources; that each democracy as (...) a unitary agent has a duty, which holds independently of poverty questions, to stop profiting from this robbery by boycotting severely oppressive regimes; and that such "democratic disengagement" requires postponing an ideal theory of global justice to a later stage, since the implications of disengagement will be so unprecedented that philosophizing past them means jumping ahead of our time. (shrink)

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full (...) compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize a social phenomenon that exists in Israel: immoral medicine.In recent years, nurses have been exposed to many instances of immoral medicine in hospitals. We want to protest about the demands for money from patients who are waiting for surgical intervention, arouse the medical community’s conscience concerning these immoral activities, and improve professional and moral behaviour.

This article examines the current state of end-of-life care in internal medicine wards in Israel, through an analysis of medical practice and the existing legal framework. The authors demonstrate the processes that lead chronically ill, elderly patients to perceive death as an unexpected phenomenon that is to be avoided at all costs. This perception stems, among other things, from the lack of public debate on questions relating to the end of life and the dominant cultural expectation that physicians provide curative (...) interventions. This results in a dearth of palliative care for the elderly along with a growing number of medical interventions that are of questionable value. The authors propose an alternative approach that highlights individual well-being and that demonstrates the potential areas of intervention by which death can be transformed into an expected and acceptable occurrence for the old and infirm. This approach allows patients to avoid unnecessary interventions and to reduce the burden of responsibility on family members and physicians, who are currently being called on to make end-of-life choices under exigent circumstances. We present these dilemmas by focusing on typical cases of incompetent elderly patients when there is no clear documentation of their wishes regarding treatment, and when their families do not have a coherent perception of what they may have wanted or of the care that would be most appropriate for them. We conclude with a call to action that highlights the need for greater awareness—through public discourse and private discussions—of end-of-life medical choices before the onset of ill-health and incompetence. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a major challenge to policy makers on how to encourage compliance to social distancing and personal protection rules. This paper compares the effectiveness of two policies that aim to increase the frequency of responsible health behavior using smartphone-tracking applications. The first involves enhanced alert capabilities, which remove social externalities and protect the users from others’ reckless behavior. The second adds a rule enforcement mechanism that reduces the users’ benefit from reckless behavior. Both strategies should be effective (...) if agents are expected-value maximizers, risk averse, and behave in accordance with cumulative prospect theory or in accordance with the Cognitive Hierarchy model. A multi-player trust-game experiment was designed to compare the effectiveness of the two policies. The results reveal a substantial advantage to the enforcement application, even one with occasional misses. The enhanced-alert strategy was completely ineffective. The findings align with the small samples hypothesis, suggesting that decision makers tend to select the options that lead to the best payoff in a small sample of similar past experiences. In the current context, the tendency to rely on a small sample appears to be more consequential than other deviations from rational choice. (shrink)

The question of what works in psychotherapy has been a subject of debate in the recent years, occupying both clinicians and researchers. In this study, we aimed to assess the current perspectives held by clinicians regarding the processes which produce changes in psychotherapy, as well as the predictors of specific views. Licensed therapists, consisting mainly of psychodynamically and integratively oriented psychologists, were asked to write in their own words what they think works in psychotherapy. Thematic analysis was employed to assess (...) the main mechanisms of change as perceived by the therapists. Differences in the prevalence of specific themes were assessed using Friedman and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Univariate logistic regressions were employed to assess the factors that predict the probability of reporting a specific mechanism of change. The results indicated that the therapeutic bond was the most highly reported mechanism of change, followed by theory-driven mechanisms of change, therapist characteristics, therapist professionalism, and client motivation. Male therapists were more likely to indicate the professionalism as a mechanism of change compared to female therapists. Higher education was associated with lower reports of therapists’ characteristics as the mechanisms of change. These results suggest that therapists acknowledge the importance of the working alliance, and that the perception of the mechanism of change is associated with various factors which comprise therapist orientation. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

This article presents the complicated ethical dilemmas that arise in the procedures and proceedings of the Nursing Disciplinary Committee, which deals with matters of life and death (e.g. patients' rights to quality. and safe care, professional integrity and account ability, and the nurse's future). The article also describes the composition and function of the Committee, the type of case it deliberates, its limitations, and the dilemmas its members may encounter.

Thomas Pogge has been challenging liberal thinking on global politics, often through critical engagement with John Rawls’ work. Pogge presents both normative and empirical arguments against Rawls: normatively, Rawls’ domestic Theory of Justice and global Law of Peoples are incompatible ideal theories; empirically, LP is too removed from the actual world to guide the foreign policy of liberal societies. My main purpose here is to contest the first, ideal theory criticism in order to direct more attention to the second, non-ideal (...) objection. I argue against Pogge that TJ and LP can be read as coherent, once one employs a Rousseauian rather than Pogge’s economic Kantian reading of TJ. The first two sections present Pogge’s view of TJ and contrast it with a Rousseauian alternative that is less cosmopolitan and economic and much more focused on the democratic and sovereign context of justice as fairness. The third section seeks to refute Pogge’s incoherence arguments, which encompass the identity of the parties to the international original position, their motivations and their decisions. Instead of a conclusion, the last section emphasizes LP’s non-ideal problems, and suggests that insofar as LP is the most robust liberal ideal theory of global politics, its empirical failure indicates the need to shift global justice theorizing even more to the non-ideal realm.Keywords: Rawls; Pogge; global justice; ideal theory; non-ideal theory; cosmopolitanism; statism; Rousseau; Kant; democracy. (shrink)